[OtherShrezzing]

The human teams also get limited to one computer shared between 3 people. The models have access to an effectively unbounded number of computers.

My argument does feel a bit like the “Watson doesn’t need to physically push the button” equivalents from when that system beat Jeopardy for the first time. I assume 5 hours on a single high-end Mac would probably still be enough compute in the near future.

[Darmani]

The people saying that were wrong, BTW -- Watson did have to physically press a button.

https://www.wired.com/2011/02/ibm-watson-speed/

> __Brown: __ Watson has a mechanical button-presser. It uses the same signaling device [the button] that the human competitors use in the game. Once Watson has decided that it wants to ring in because it has found an answer with a high-enough confidence, and it receives the signal that the buzzers are open and you can ring in, it then has to trigger the mechanical button presser and mechanically press the button.

[OtherShrezzing]

Watson originally just sent an electronic signal. The physical button pushing was introduced later, to stave off the criticism that it had an unfair advantage.

[amluto]

I found the Watson match to be rather absurd. It would have been much more interesting if the rules had been modified so that all contestants had, say, two seconds two press the buzzer and that the contestant who got to answer first would be chosen by random selection among those who pressed the button. This would at least have made the competition be about who could come up with the most correct answers (questions).