It’s not too different than those old sci-fi movies that depicted man against machine — but it’s far less violent. This week, Jeopardy is hosting man — all-time Jeopardy champion Brad Rutter — against machine, IBM’s Watson supercomputer.
After round one, Watson was tied with Rutter. The first of three episodes aired Monday. Watson and Rutter both racked up $5,000 in earnings. Meanwhile, Ken Jennings, another successful Jeopardy winner from the past, was in third place with $2,000.
“Watson consists of over 2,800 POWER750 chips, sitting in some five separate racks on two different units. Linking them all together, you create a deep analytics engine that houses over 15 trillion bytes,” said Todd Watson, a social-media and marketing manager at IBM. “But, [host Alex] Trebek explained in his continuing setup, Watson would have to ‘stand on his own’ and rely on the knowledge that was stored in his memory, and that he couldn’t be connected to the Internet to look anything else up during the match.”
Understanding Context
Over the past four years, a team of IBM scientists set out to accomplish a grand challenge — build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. Watson is also competing Tuesday and Wednesday nights on Jeopardy. Jeopardy is the ultimate test for Watson because the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not.
According to IBM, Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context of human language, and rapidly process information to find precise answers to complex questions, holds enormous potential to transform how computers help people accomplish tasks in business and in their personal lives.
IBM expects Watson to enable people to rapidly find specific answers to complex questions. Big Blue…