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Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-Playing Computer, Trumps Humans

by Matthew Zuras on February 11, 2010 at 02:50 PM

Readers, IBM has been developing a supercomputer that could compete with human brainiacs on the quiz show 'Jeopardy' -- and it scares the hell out of us. Let's forget, for a moment, that we've been transported back to 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue machine beat world-champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match, solidifying both hopes and fears that computers would one day outsmart their creators. (And also ignore the fact that this was the same year that 'Terminator 2' predicted we would see artificial intelligence become self-aware and result in a Skynet-facilitated Armageddon.) Instead, let's focus on the fact that Watson, IBM's behemoth 'Jeopardy'-slaughtering machine, is now smart enough to beat humans. Oh, and it's not connected to the Internet.

IBM first announced its plans to build Watson in April of last year, and the machine has since grown to be the size of eight refrigerators. Why so big? Since Watson doesn't have a network of Web data from which to cull answers, it is composed of a POWER7 cluster and a Blue Gene supercomputer, as well as thousands of processing cores and terabytes of memory. All that hardware allows Watson to make human-like decisions about the questions it's asked. It may be fairly certain that it knows an answer, but takes into account all of the scores and its own winnings before deciding to wager a response. Obviously, its response time will be faster than a human's, but that advantage is balanced by the computer's slowness to understand natural syntax and to make educated guesses.

IBM is still trying to make Watson smarter, but hasn't announced if (or when) the machine will debut on the show, itself. (Neither has the company released its current win statistics.) Obviously, IBM's goal is not to spend millions developing a mere trivia computer, but rather to advance a system that is able to make logical decisions when not all information is available. In effect, developers are trying to make it more human. And this would have applications across multiple fields, including medical diagnostics and business systems.

What scares us, though, is the possibility of a military application. Remember how in 'T2' everyone thought Sarah Connor was nuts for thinking that the army could deploy unpiloted drone aircraft? And then how those aircraft decided to initiate a global nuclear war? Let's hope that Watson is a pacifist. [From: NetworkWorld]

Tags: deep blue, DeepBlue, ibm, jeopardy, supercomputer, terminator 2, Terminator2, top, video games, VideoGames, watson

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