Can I take a game-changing artificial intelligence technology for $400, Alex?
Popular TV game show Jeopardy tries to bring the quest for artificial intelligence to the airwaves Feb. 14-16 by pitting the IBM computer called “Watson” against past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. With Alex Trebek as host, the show seeks to demonstrate “Deep Question Answer” technology that computer scientists call much more than a ratings stunt.
“This is huge; this isn’t just about answering questions,” says computational linguistics expert George Luger of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who was not part of IBM’s team. “Everything before this was just a run-up to computers as true personal assistants.”
IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., set 20 researchers on a three-year quest to build the computer system, looking for a challenge to top 2002’s chess-playing champion computer Deep Blue. The effort would also play into the company’s interests in business software and services, IBM team leader David Ferrucci says.
What’s different about Watson? It’s not like ordinary “expert” computer systems, which can handle simple questions such as finding a store location. Those systems are far too narrow in their focus for answering Jeopardy-style questions, he says, filled with double entendres, purposely confusing references and wordplay.
For example, a question in a category such as “diplomatic relations” might combine two parts: “Of the four countries that the United States does not have diplomatic relations with, the one that is farthest north.” Questions that require breaking apart baffle expert systems, but Watson, in contrast, weighs multiple lines of evidence for answers to each piece, relying on its own encyclopedic database, then sifting answers, finally assigning a likelihood of correctness to each.
Ask an online search engine such as Yahoo or Google such a complex question, and it will spit up Web pages tied to key words for…