Last night’s showing of “Jeopardy!,” which featured former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter taking on IBM’s supercomputer Watson, was the highest rated episode of the show since 2007, drawing an 8.7 household rating.
The taping’s draw was 24 percent higher than the show’s 2010 average, and a similar (or higher) rating is expected for tonight’s continuation episode.
After the first day of the three-day event, Watson was tied with Rutter at $5000 each, with Jennings lagging behind at $2000. The winner will receive $1 million. Second place gets $300,000 and third gets $200,000. IBM will donate all their winnings to charity and Jennings and Rutter will donate half.
At the end of day 2 (which just aired) Watson had taken a commanding lead, with $35,734 to Rutter’s $10,400 and Jennings’ $4,800. However, the machine did make a huge blunder in the ‘Final Jeopardy’ question which was in the category “U.S. Cities.”
The clue was: “Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second for a World War II battle.” Watson answered ‘Toronto’ while both human competitors answered correctly, with ‘Chicago.’
IBM made sure to post an explanation for the Toronto answer:
David Ferrucci, the manager of the Watson project at IBM Research, explained during a viewing of the show on Monday morning that several of things probably confused Watson. First, the category names on Jeopardy! are tricky. The answers often do not exactly fit the category. Watson, in his training phase, learned that categories only weakly suggest the kind of answer that is expected, and, therefore, the machine downgrades their significance. The way the language was parsed provided an advantage for the humans and a disadvantage for Watson, as well. “What US city” wasn’t in the question. If it had been, Watson would have given US cities much more weight as it searched for the answer. Adding to the confusion for Watson, there are cities named Toronto in the United States and the Toronto in Canada has an American League baseball team. It probably picked up those facts from the written material it has digested. Also, the machine didn’t find much evidence to connect either city’s airport to World War II. (Chicago was a very close second on Watson’s list of possible answers.) So this is just one of those situations that’s a snap for a reasonably knowledgeable human but a true brain teaser for the machine.
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According to Bloomberg, Amazon is on pace to sell 8 million Kindle e-readers this year, much higher than analysts have predicted.
The news agency cites people “aware of the company’s sales projections,” and says the 8 million sales figure should be hit easily. Analysts, on average, had anticipated 5 million sales.
These same sources also say Amazon sold 2.4 million Kindles last year.
Goldman Sachs had estimated 4-5 million, Caris & Co had predicted 4.8 million and Citigroup, Barclays Capital, BGC Partners LP and ThinkEquity all noted anticipated sales of 5 million.
Amazon recently began selling a thinner, lighter Wi-Fi-only model of their Kindle for $139, seeing strong sales after its launch.
The e-tailing giant has not confirmed the numbers.
Rivals Sony and Barnes & Noble do not disclose their e-reader sales, either.
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Samsung has said today that they have sold 1 million Galaxy Tab tablets already, surpassing their expectations.
When the device launched two months ago, Samsung said it expected to just hit 1 million sales by the end of the year.
The device sells on all four major carriers in the U.S., and on a number of carriers worldwide.
Both Verizon and AT&T said recently they were “encouraged” by Tab sales, but neither revealed specific numbers.
For comparison’s sake, the market leader Apple iPad hit 1 million sales in just 30 days, and sales have recently topped 8 million.
Samsung’s tablet runs on Android 2.2, has a 1GHz processor, a 7-inch multi-touch screen and dual cameras.
