[ExI] Watson On Jeopardy

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 12:24 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/2/15 Darren Greer wrote:
> <snip>
> > One thing though. When he gets it wrong, he really gets it wrong. One
> > question asked the name of the place where a train both begins and ends.
> It
> > was 'terminus.' Watson said 'Venice.' I found this quite funny, and was
> > wondering what the algorithms brought up to give him such an answer. I
> did a
> > search on the 'net for trains and Venice to see if I could come up with a
> > strong connection that he might have found in his databanks, but I didn't
> > find one.
> >
> >
>
> No, you misheard. Watson was closer than that.
>
> <http://www.unwir3d.com/887352/ibms-watson-impressive-jeopardy-debut>
>
> Quote:
> The first one he got wrong was something like "A bus trip can either
> begin or end here, from the Latin for end." Watson responded "What is
> finis." That was wrong and Jennings chimed in with the correct
> "Terminal." So Watson answered with the literal Latin for end
> (terminus also means end).



But even the "Venice" misunderstanding makes sense: Venice's train station
is a terminal, otherwise trains would fall into the sea...
A google map view:
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.442052,12.320116&spn=0.010012,0.026157&t=h&z=16

Alfio
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110215/48100ab2/attachment.html>