The New Yorker completely missed the point of the verdict, which was “It’s none of our business. We’re returning the question to the people and the state legislatures so people can vote on it via their elected representatives.” Also: is it intentional that the host looks like a man in a dress? View this post on Instagram A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons) Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Jeopardy
Alex Trebek Has Cancer
And yet Pat Sajak is in perfect health . . . this is fair?! Actually, I’ve never liked Alex Trebek. I used to watch the original version of Jeopardy!, hosted by a guy named Art Fleming, who, unlike Trebek, didn’t act like he was smarter than the contestants just because he had the answers right there in front of him . . . Read more →
Intelligence in the Cloud
IBM Watson, the Jeopardy champion, runs on 90 IBM Power 750 servers, with eight 3.5 GHz cores per server. Currently on Amazon EC2, eight extra large compute instances will cost you $2.40/hour. If you want to run 90 of them, you’re looking at a shade over $200/hour. This brings up a couple of questions: For what tasks could artificial intelligence be as good or better as a highly trained person at $200/hour? What would this mean for society? Thanks to David Patterson at UC Berkeley for bringing this to my attention. Read more →