'Jeopardy!' To Pit Humans Against IBM Machine 164
digitaldc writes "The game show Jeopardy! will pit man versus machine this winter in a competition that will show how successful scientists are in creating a computer that can mimic human intelligence. Two of the venerable game show's most successful champions — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — will play two games against 'Watson,' a computer program developed by IBM's artificial intelligence team. The matches will be spread over three days that will air Feb. 14-16, the game show said on Tuesday. The competition is reminiscent of when IBM developed a chess-playing computer to compete against chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997."
Why Don't You Play Against It? (Score:5, Informative)
A computer will be much better at facts. So it's mostly a question of grammar. And the hardest problem is likely figuring out wordplay, which occasionally comes up in jeopardy.
If you think this is true, you can play against Watson online [nytimes.com]. About seven years ago, I saw some pretty impressive crossword solvers that were decent at wordplay and I've imagined they've gotten much better at developing novel links between words to exploit puns and the like. Never perfect but slowly getting better in odd ways -- like most of AI.
We've discussed this so [slashdot.org] many [slashdot.org] times it hurts [slashdot.org]. I've wanted to watch this for almost a year, I was hoping Jeopardy! wouldn't need to milk this hype for all it's worth to stay relevant.
Re:that depends... (Score:4, Informative)
"How can you find all these answers without being connected to the Internet?
Watson will not have enough data to answer every possible Jeopardy! question in its self-contained memory, nor can it possibly predict the questions it will get. In this sense it has the same limitations as do the best human contestants. The entire Watson computer system will be self-contained and on stage as are the human contestants – no external connections, no life-lines – what you see is what you get. The purpose of this technology showcase is to demonstrate the system's ability to deeply analyze the data it does have and to compute accurate confidences based on supporting or refuting natural language evidence. Think of it as if Watson has read a lot of books and in real time relates what it read to the question to find and support the right answers."
http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa/faq.shtml [ibm.com]