Go Fuck Yourself: Watson

Welcome back to the long discontinued series, Go Fuck Yourself. As you are probably aware, this week on Jeopardy IBM pitted their superdouche computer Watson against the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time. OF ALL TIME. IBM wanted to see if they could create a computer that could analyze the "subtle nuances of language" that make Jeopardy "so gosh darn challenging." Alright, you got me. That second quote was me. But the first one is real. And after watching the results, everybody is going to be like, "Yay, Watson beat Ken and Brad. OMG!!! IBM is so awesome." But I watched the entire match today and the first round on Monday so I feel safe in saying that IBM, while doing something pretty incredible in creating a computer that can compete on Jeopardy, didn't really create a computer that can compete on Jeopardy. And here's why:

Every time we have dinner at my mom's she makes us watch Jeopardy at 7:30. So I watch a fair amount of said program. Usually they have some sort of category like "Before and After" or some sort of pun category that's more about how fast you can think rather than a straight know the answer type of category. You know what I'm talking about. Like "Drop a letter from this word for a douchey asshole blogger and you get a nickname for Richard." So the question would be, "What is prick." Those kind of categories. But with Watson they didn't have any of this stuff. It was almost exclusively straightforward trivia bullshit. Well no fucking shit a computer is better and faster than humans at trivia. Does that really shock anyone? Oh wow, computers are really fast. Even my piece of shit laptop can get 1.65 million results for "Asian midget golden shower bukakke" in .29 seconds . . . you know, like hypothetically if I were to perform such a search . . .

Right, where was I? So they tailor-made a set of questions that fit Watson's answering abilities. That would be like if I was playing two conservative Christian missionaries and they had an entire category, "Made-up Swears." Surprise, surprise: Slick swept the category. I'm impressed with Watson, but not that impressed.

Especially because Watson is a cheating motherfucker. How come when the final Jeopardy category is "U.S. Cities" and he gets it wrong, oh look, he only wagered $700. But then the category is "19th Century Novelists" and well gosh darnit, he got it right and wagered $17,000. Fuck that. That's the old serbian jew double bluff and you're not going to fool me with it. But you might say, "Yeah but Ken was a lot closer in the second game so the computer was just risking enough to beat Ken's best score." Well, I thought about that. If the computer was that smart, then it would be smart enough to know that it just had to risk enough to beat Ken's best 2 day score, and therefore, wouldn't have risked very much because the only way he could have lost was by risking that much money in the second game. Plus, it's a fucking computer. The concept of winning the 2 day match should have been given a higher precedent than winning a lot of money. What's he going to do with $75,000 that he couldn't do by winning only $55,000? Fuck Watson, he obviously cheated.

So now that you've heard my witty and well thought out criticisms, I can make fun of other people's retarded ones. Today I was listening to Rock 102: Springfield's Classic Rock and Bax of the possibly famous (?) Bax and O'Brien said that Watson was stupid because he repeated a wrong answer that another player had already given. No shit. He's a fucking computer. He can't listen to other people's answers. Maybe if you paid attention and realized that he receives the questions electronically, then you would know that he doesn't get audio clues. And normally I like Bax because he's a big fat loudmouth, just like me. But in this case, he just looks stupid and ignorant. Unlike myself who is always articulate and well-informed.

Finally, completely unrelated to Watson: Anyone that drives a Cadillac Escalade EXT just has to be the worst human being imaginable. "Hey everybody, look at me. I drive a retarded looking $60,000 pickup truck. I like showing that I have a lot of money but I also enjoy being able to haul lumber. NOW I CAN DO BOTH!!" I can't imagine a car brand that has less to do with the functional nature of a pickup than Cadillac. That would be like if Ferrari put out a line of lawnmowers. But not riding mowers. Not even electric lawnmowers. The old fashioned push mowers. My uncle used to use one to mow his lawn in Maine. It always made me smile.

So go fuck yourself Watson and Cadillac Escalade EXT owners.

-Slick

P.S. All three times I typed the word Cadillac, for some reason I put "Cadillace" before having to correct myself. I have no idea why I did this, but I thought you might be interested in knowing that I may be retarded.