“I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.” That tongue-in-cheek surrender on Wednesday came from one of the two humans vanquished in Jeopardy by IBM’s Watson supercomputer. TV fans may recognize the line as an homage to an episode of The Simpsons.
That carbon unit, Ken Jennings, added the words onto his Final Jeopardy answer, when the three-day match was nearly over. In the first part of Wednesday’s game, the third and final day of the Battle of the Sentients, Jennings was beating Watson and fellow human Brad Rutter. But that brief glimpse of victory was short-lived as Watson came roaring back and won the evening. The final score for the three-day tournament was $21,600 for Rutter, $24,000 for Jennings, and $77,147 for Watson.
‘Great Carbon-Based Hope’
Watson won the $1 million top prize for his IBM keepers, which will be donated to charity. Jennings won $300,000 and Rutter $200,000, of which half of each prize will be donated to a charity of their choice.
In an essay on Slate.com, Jennings wrote that, when first selected, he envisioned himself as “the Great Carbon-Based Hope.” But when he entered IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in New York’s Westchester County, where the shows were taped in January, he found that “this was to be an away game for humanity,” and his role was not hero, but villain.
Like any champion, Jennings had a pretty good idea about how his main opponent worked. He described Watson zeroing in on key words in a clue, looking in its huge database for associations with those words, and then checking the results against contextual clues, such as category name, kind of answer desired, and so on.
He surmised that this is essentially what his own brain does, and said Watson has much in common with a champion Jeopardy human player: “It’s…