'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."
Re:Wordplay (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wordplay (Score:5, Interesting)
You're drawing a false distinction between a poorly understood electrochemical process (human memory) and a well understood method of simulating the same with silicon.
It's the end result that matters. In this case, since human language and logic are inherently fuzzy, the computer will be at a disadvantage in many cases.
Re:If that is representative of watson's capabilit (Score:5, Interesting)
Then this will be pretty thoroughly uneventful. I easily beat it without looking at the internet at all. It managed to get answers very severely wrong. It did manage to hit a couple of the before and after which it seemed to have a particularly hard time with.
At this year's CASCON, I spoke to Murray Campbell from IBM. He's one of the lead people who work on this project and who also worked on Deep Blue. I discussed this with him. My girlfriend had told me that she also had no difficulty beating the online demo. He answered that the online demo is only a part of the system, and that their full system routinely beats top Jeopardy players. They're going to showcase their system on TV because they truly believe it has a chance at winning.
Unrelated to this, I also learned that Deep Blue had custom processors engineered and fabricated (VLSI) just to be chess accelerators. Prior to this, I always thought the machine was a relatively powerful supercomputer (with general purpose hardware) running their custom chess software. It turns out that it had many blades of processors dedicated to searching positions really fast, which each even contained libraries of chess opening moves engraved in ROM.