This is either a question or a suggestion but.. is there (or can there be) a more technical AMA-type site for engineers and scientists? I like Reddit but I can't help but feel the right person could curate the questions better for technical and scientific stuff rather than relying on the sort of voting patterns Reddit is susceptible to.
Frequent intelligently curated but publicly driven (i.e. not just "interviews") AMAs with scientists and teams working on cool stuff would make for great reading. Even AMAs with the tech teams of the startups we all know and love on HN would be a great start.
I'd do it (the "if you're gunna complain.." approach) but I'm not well enough connected. Imagine someone like Andrew Warner or pg (who could pretty much get anyone at the table) curating a site like that. It'd be a must-visit to both ask questions and read the answers.
UPDATE: Or is this essentially Quora I've reinvented?
Reddit's solution to that is to create your own subreddit and effectively become elitist about what's allowed. Hence a lot of comments as to Reddit demographic issues is met with "remove default subreddits".
Quora is similar but catered to a smaller audience I assume. Both places have moderators but I don't know if either can control the answers (On reddit, only moderators can).
I am under the impression that the actual IBM has not responded to any of the questions yet. Any knee-jerk or obvious answers would be from your typical Reddit user.
I wish they would put him up as a webapp. It may not be economical to have a supercomputer online that can only answer one question at a time -- but they might find enough overlap that he could start caching frequent requests or even queuing requests as necessary. Or better yet, scale slowly by invite only.
With three of the best Jeopardy players ever, I thought they might make the questions a bit more challenging. I can see why this might not work in this case because Watson was programmed using regular questions. But I agree, I would have liked to see the skill level rise with the caliber of player.
A Watson that knows 70% of the answers will beat a human who knows 90% of the answers, purely due to better reflexes. Of course, buzzer skill is partly how KenJen won so many games, so I'm not complaining. Just not AS impressed by Watson as some people.
Except that it's not just reflexes. Watson has to compute the answer before the humans. That's no small task. This video is a great technical explanation of how it works:
I'm sure the same thing comes out of Jeopardy "Tournament of Champions" games where a number of very good human players come together. It's just that only regular Jeopardy watchers every noticed those games were taking place.
It just seems more pronounced with Watson because it drew in a large crowd of new (but perhaps one-time) viewers.
I don't think I realized the degree and I've been an off-and-on regular Jeopardy watcher over the years. I don't see this subtlety as hurting Jeopardy's brand any though. It does make me wish that there had been a better platform for competition of this sort that would have had a more level playing field.
(The humans actually had some advantage of anticipating the buzz-in signal so I'm not saying that Watson had all the cards. I'm just saying that a lot of the contest hinged on a factor that inherently could not be made apples-to-apples.)
Frequent intelligently curated but publicly driven (i.e. not just "interviews") AMAs with scientists and teams working on cool stuff would make for great reading. Even AMAs with the tech teams of the startups we all know and love on HN would be a great start.
I'd do it (the "if you're gunna complain.." approach) but I'm not well enough connected. Imagine someone like Andrew Warner or pg (who could pretty much get anyone at the table) curating a site like that. It'd be a must-visit to both ask questions and read the answers.
UPDATE: Or is this essentially Quora I've reinvented?