Title text: I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.
This comic is a reference to IBM's computer Watson that beat humans at Jeopardy. The IBM team created a computer that could formulate a response to a Jeopardy-style question. In case you are not familiar, Jeopardy is a game played where the contestants are given the answer to a question, and must devise the question. A question might be "The United States joined this war in 1941" to which the contestant must answer "What is World War II?". When going up against two Jeopardy champions, Watson was able to beat them both.
Megan chimes in that we are "pretty awesome at teaching" which is very true. Humans are the best (on this planet) at teaching other things to do a set of tasks. We train dogs, cats, lizards, birds, other people, and now we are getting quite good at getting a computer, a simple machine completely of our own design, to mimic our own thought patterns and make decisions similar to what we would make.
The title text makes fun of teaching our children values by suggesting we are just trying to hold on to our ability to beat them in something.
- [Cueball sits at a computer; Megan stands behind him.]
- Cueball: Wow — researchers taught a computer to beat the world's best humans at yet ANOTHER task. Does our species have ANYTHING left to be proud of?
- Megan: Well, it sounds like we're pretty awesome at teaching.
- Cueball: Huh? What good is THAT?