IBM recently rolled out its newest Jeopardy champion, a computer called Watson. It has taken programmers over 4 years to come up with a computer program that they think is smart enough to crush their human competitors in Jeopardy. In a two-day exhibition match, Watson (the computer) competed against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Both of the human players are great Jeopardy champions in their own right, and should be able to represent to best human competition possible. The championship match will take place on February 14th, but by all accounts, Watson is holding its own.
This is an amazing step forward for technology and computer programing in general. While programs like Deep Blue were able to become undisputed Chess champions, games like Jeopardy are a bit harder for a computer program to handle. While Chess is a highly technical, strategy focused logic game, Jeopardy requires extensive knowledge in a wide variety of subjects and the ability to understand the complex questions and word play that is commonplace in the clues.
Watson was feed loads of data, from encyclopedias to play scripts. His programmers said that they fed it just about any type of data they could get their hands on. And while Watson isn't connected to the internet, it has a large database of knowledge to search through. The biggest challenge, however was getting Watson to actually be able to understand conversational speech. The computer's set up is called “Massively Parallel Probabilistic Evidence-Based Architecture”. The stats say that it runs on 2,800 Power7 processing cores.
The way it works is that when Watson is fed a text-based clue, it has the same amount of time to ring in as the human players. When it is able to find an answer that registers and reaches its confidence interval, it will ring in. Although at first, it would ring in with terribly wrong answers, over the past few years, Watson has been able to make better connections between its massive data store and how the information is all related. It buzzes in about half the time, and its success rate is now reported to be about 85-95%.
It still remains to be seen how Watson will compete in the tournament with human competitors. Although it may end up having a higher ration of correct answers, I think that it will be difficult to account for things like Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy. Both of those portions of the game will require critical thinking and a certain threshold for risk.
Whether Watson wins or loses, this computer program is an interesting development in the world of programming. By creating a program that can decipher the clever wordplay that is a hallmark of the more difficult clues in the game, and learning to make connections between its data stores, Watson might be taking technology one step closer to Artificial Intelligence.
Who do you think will win in the tournament? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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