The confidence estimations are most impressive to me, and of course absolutely crucial in a game where you have to risk points to make points.
But the fact that bulk correlation mining can answer even some 'vague and indirect' questions isn't that remarkable. Jeopardy clues are a very constrained domain: short clues in English with some distinctive idioms, and short answers that are drawn from some well-defined and constantly recurring classes.
With true natural language understanding, offline searchable copies of Wikipedia and Wiktionary – 64GB, tops? – could be used to answer almost every question. Instead Watson uses 15TB of RAM and 2880 cores.
But the fact that bulk correlation mining can answer even some 'vague and indirect' questions isn't that remarkable. Jeopardy clues are a very constrained domain: short clues in English with some distinctive idioms, and short answers that are drawn from some well-defined and constantly recurring classes.
With true natural language understanding, offline searchable copies of Wikipedia and Wiktionary – 64GB, tops? – could be used to answer almost every question. Instead Watson uses 15TB of RAM and 2880 cores.