IBM's Watson Computer To Compete on Jeopardy Tonight2011-02-14 09:49 by DanielaTags: IBM
Tonight, all-time Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter will return to the show to play against a new competitor - an IBM computer named Watson. Although this contest is reminiscent of the 1997 event in which IBM's Deep Blue computer played chess against Garry Kasparov and won, the challenge to winning Jeopardy is more complex than chess, which has well-defined rules and a finite number of moves that can be calculated and analyzed. Jeopardy's sometimes hard-to-understand clues contain little puns and jokes, e.g. "This trusted friend was the first non-dairy powdered creamer," (answer: What is Coffee Mate?) and require natural language understanding and an ability to determine context as well as knowledge of a wide range of topic areas including popular culture, history and entertainment. IBM engineers spent four years building, training and testing the artificial intelligence that went into Watson. PBS ran a fascinating Nova program last week on this project and other, earlier attempts to make computers approximate the human brain. IBM engineers fed the computer millions of documents and thousands of questions and examples to build a knowledge base and applied search technology, machine learning, rules and analytics to it to try to teach Watson all the information it would need for tonight's game, then tested the computer for months. The success of this work will be shown in tonight's episode of Jeopardy. Read more -here-
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