In the second day of his appearance on TV’s Jeopardy, IBM’s Watson supercomputer laid waste to his human opponents. But even Watson, with 90 IBM Power 750 servers, has weaknesses.
On Tuesday, the Smartest Computer in the World blew past his carbon-based opponents, champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. At the evening’s conclusion, the computer had racked up $35,734, while Rutter had $10,400 and Jennings $4,800. At the end of Monday’s game, Watson was tied with Rutter at $,5000 each, with Jennings at $2,000. The match concludes Wednesday.
‘Fundamentally Different’ from Humans
The winner gets $1 million. Since Watson is not designed for shopping, IBM will donate the prize to charity if its creation wins. The two humans have said they’ll donate half if they manage to pull it out on Wednesday.
Eric Nyberg, a Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science who headed a CMU team that helped IBM, has noted that Watson’s responses are “fundamentally different” from humans. For instance, a human contestant can buzz and take a few seconds to answer, while Watson will only buzz when it has a high degree of confidence that the answer is correct. Watson can process and evaluate two million pages of information in three seconds. But if the question is short, Watson is at a disadvantage because it takes the full three seconds on every question.
More difficult questions can throw Watson off. In a brief moment of cheer for human partisans, Watson whiffed badly on the Final Jeopardy question Tuesday. The category was U.S. Cities, and the answer clue was: “This city’s largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.” The correct response was “What is Chicago?” Both humans answered correctly. Watson, who has never spent much time in airports, much…