Jim Lux pointed out in an earlier post the reaction time element on buzzing in from the (invisible to the audience) "go" light. I only watched about 10 minutes of this, but my impression was that the machine did have a reaction time advantage. Alex T. was a little vague on how the machine was fed the question and if he explained what its equivalent of the "go" light is I missed it. It could be decisive - sending the entire question to the machine at the instant it became visible to the humans would give the machine an advantage, since it could digest the message before the contestants eyes could even track across the first line of text, let alone until they heard the entire question. In any case, for the part I watched the machine was beating the humans to the buzzer pretty consistently. It was cute, but a little silly, that the machine had to push the button with a mechanical plunger. Unless they built a typical human reaction delay into that mechanism one would expect the plunger to be much faster than a thumb.
In terms of score/watt the humans had the machine beat by a mile :-). David Mathog mat...@caltech.edu Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
