Three Beautiful Thing 07-11-2023: Walk to The Gondolier, Looking Back at Watson on *Jeopardy*, Slow Beer on the Patio

1. I've been cautious about being outdoors too much after it took me nearly a week or so to recover from getting overheated a couple of weeks ago. Today, though, I ate a small dinner late in the afternoon and gave my food an hour and a half or so to settle. If I go on a walk soon after eating, I almost immediately get winded. The sun was setting. The temperature was moderate. I decided to walk down to The Gondolier. Josh had purchased three cans of really good beer at The Gondolier during his family's visit and I decided to check out their small, but high quality, selection of craft beers. 

I had a very good walk to the store and I purchased 19.2 ounce cans of Buoy's Double IPA and No-Li's Cascade Fog, a tasty hazy IPA. 

2. While walking, I listened to the next episode of the podcast This is Jeopardy. It focused on the 2011, three day match featuring Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and Watson, an IBM question answering super computer. 

While it was fascinating to hear Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter discuss being defeated by Watson -- it wasn't even close, really -- it was also fascinating to hear the back story of how a team at IBM developed Watson, what the challenges were, and how they prepared Watson to compete on the show. 

IBM had earlier developed a chess playing super computer, Deep Blue. In 1997, Deep Blue defeated chess Grandmaster, Garry Kasparov.

Now the question was whether IBM could do with language and information something similar to what it had developed with Deep Blue (Deep Blue could consider about 200 million chess moves per second). 

It turned out -- and this is a crucial aspect in Jeopardy -- that it was very difficult for the humans to buzz in ahead of Watson with their questions to the board's answers. Given how Watson was programmed to buzz in, the machine had an advantage that the humans couldn't overcome. Watson was also immensely knowledgeable, but so were Jennings and Rutter, and so, really, Watson's decisive victory owed a lot to its buzzer quickness.

3. Back home, I joined Debbie on the patio in the most ideal of outdoor conditions. While some parts of the country are suffering from brutal heat waves and New England has been deluged with biblical rainfall, here in Kellogg the temperatures during the day have been moderate the last couple of days and the evenings almost miraculously cool.

I slowly drank my can of Buoy Double IPA. 

I learned online that the 19.2 oz cans are known as stovepipes. 

One stovepipe of this beer was plenty for me and I really enjoyed its grapefruit flavor and its piney and floral hits on my nose. Its bitterness was, to me, moderate, giving each sip I enjoyed a pleasing finish.