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IBM' Watson and Jeopardy

The idea of a machine that could think like a human has fascinated us for generations, and has  inspired many science fiction stories. With the exponential increase in the power of computers and  the growth of the Internet, many now believe that the basic goals of artificial intelligence may be  achieved in the near future.

While IBM s Deep Blue computer program defeated Grand Master Gary Kasparov in 1997, the system was totally useless for anything but chess. IBM s Watson program was built using insights from the Deep Blue development team and soon demonstrated its unique abilities by competing against humans in a special Jeopardy championship. The idea of testing a powerful, custom-made computer against the knowledge capacities of the human mind initially seemed farfetched to engineers and scientists at IBM Research.

The video below describes the process by which the IBM team approached the seemingly impossible task of producing a machine that could understand the complexities of natural language, in the form of Jeopardy trivia questions. In addition to being equipped with the computing power of 2,208 processors and 200 million pages of information, Watson had to be taught logic and strategy that would enable it to interpret an array of complicated trivia questions and select the correct answer from among the answers. The culmination of the IBM team s efforts came in 2011, when Watson defeated the two top Jeopardy champions in a specially designed tournament. Although the IBM scientists who worked on the Watson project doubtlessly found the work intellectually stimulating, it is also likely that IBM saw the possibility of applying Watson s technological advances in commercial applications.

"Watson" is likely to be a harbinger of a new era in which machine or artificial intelligence will become increasingly prevalent in daily life.

Learn about Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer, in this video excerpt from NOVA scienceNOW:

How Does the Brain Work?

Created by a team at IBM, Watson was designed to answer questions on a variety of subjects, and was put to the test by competing against human contestants on the quiz show Jeopardy!. The game requires factual knowledge as well as the ability to understand nuanced language (including slang and puns) and was a big challenge for the question-answering computer system. Watson played the game by analyzing thousands of examples from a huge database of documents and computing similarities between words and phrases.

The success of Watson was a significant milestone in the field of artificial intelligence.