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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE beat natural skill as IBM's supercomputer finally thrashed a pair of human Jeopardy quiz show champions.
More powerful than Big Blue's chess playing Deep Blue, IBM's data analytics and natural language processing computer called Watson beat its human opponents at end of a three day challenge on the US quiz show Jeopardy.
The humans, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, are very clever Jeopardy super champions, which makes the defeat even more humbling. Watson won $77,147, Jennings came in second with $24,000 and Rutter, who Reuters said had won millions on previous Jeopardy games, limped in with $21,600. The prize was $1 million, which will go to charity.
At first there was a glimmer of hope for the humans at the first stage. The INQURIER reported a couple of days ago that Rutter drew the initial match with Watson, winning $5,000 each. But Watson went on to pull ahead decisively in the second and final matches.
The Jeopardy show is styled so contestants answer with a question after the host gives the answer. Watson came up with the right response with "What is Sanskrit?" and got the questions right on designer Marc Jacobs and European agricultural policies.
The linguistic and analytical supercomputer has ten racks of IBM Power 750 Linux servers with 15TB of memory. It has 2,880 CPU cores to process a question, search for the answer and produce it in less than three seconds.
That's far superior technology to the one Sinclair Spectrum that powers The INQUIRER's research department. µ
We had all the answers, now we got all the questions! We robots can rule the world now!
ps.: 42 my metal balls!
I SAW A SIMILAR SYSTEM YEARS AGO THAT YOU COULD PRESENT A FEW PARAGRAPHS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE TEXT, THEN INTERROGATE IT WITH QUESTIONS LIKE "WHAT COLOR WERE THE SHOES?" AND IT WAS ABLE TO INTERPRET THE QUESTION THEN FIND THE ANSWER.
HALF OF IBM'S WINNINGS WENT TO WORLDCOMMUNITYGRID.ORG WHICH THEY IN FACT OWN, HM IT APPEARS THEY WERE ACTUALLY NOT SO CHARITABLE AFTER ALL.
WATSON'S 'FACE' WAS AN ANIMATION OF THE GLOBE BEING OVERRUN WITH VAST COLLECTIONS OF MISSILES CIRCLING IT AT MACH 200 AND CRASHING WITH EXPLOSIONS THE SIZE OF TEXAS AND FIVE LINES OF DESTRUCTION EXUDING OFF THE NORTH POLE. IS THERE ANY OTHER WAY TO DESCRIBE THAT AWFUL FACE OF FUTURE DEATH?
MY PS3 RUNS ON A CELL BROADBAND THAT COMES FROM - WAIT FOR IT - YES, IT COMES FROM IBM.
News Flash - - A backhoe can dig dirt faster than a man with a shovel -
As smart as this machine is, too bad it's doing "trivial" work and not performing some sort of useful functions for the rest of the world.
That's the real joke. IBM- We make useless trivia computer systems.
Very interesting article about a supercomputer against human contest.
Even though it wasn't perfect, I'm still impressed with the rationalization Watson was able to show. I don't really think that it was "smarter" than the other players, just that it could buzz-in quicker as noticed by the look of annoyance on Jennings' face. More of my thoughts about it on the eZanga.com site: http://bit.ly/fhMX9p
A supercomputer is a collective of hardware designed and manufactured by hundreds of people, then programed by groups of people. The other two guys have had less work on them I would wager. It's like Joe Blow playing football against the Green Bay Packers. The humans did better.
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