IBM Supercomputer Challenges Humans on TV Quiz

Watson the Supercomputer is set to make its television debut on US quiz show Jeopardy , where it will play against two of the shows most successful contestants for a prize of $1m .

The technology behind Watson relies on analytics to understand what is being asked, to crunch through massive amounts of data and provide the best answer based on the evidence it finds. That store of information adds up to 15 terabytes of memory, about the size of the total printed text in the Library of Congress. Mr Smith said inside Watson's brain are around "a million different books and 200m pages of material".

Watson's adversaries in the show are Ken Jennings, who won 74 games in a row - the most consecutive victories ever - and Brad Rutter, who scored the most money with winnings of more than $3m.
www.bbc.co.uk...

The ultimate battle between man and machine ........ not sure who I want to win though

reply to post by gortex


i will be watching..

any bet takers? LOL

I mentioned IBM's Watson in a previous thread here on ATS back in Dec. I guess no one was to interested as it was a little off topic. But not by much really....

Anyways, I have been trying to find out who actually won the game after it was originally taped. Call me crazy but the thought of a machine winning against these guys just scares the living piss out of me. I really hope that the reason no spoilers have slipped is because the humans won.

PS you can bet I will be watching... I already told the little lady that Valentines Day wont happen this year unless I watch or confirm a recording of the episode.

no human has read over one million books. this is more one-sided than a las vegas black jack table.

I'm putting my money on the machine.

It reminds me of the Kasparov / "Deep Blue" chess matches a decade or so ago.

The machine won, but it had a massively unfair advantage in that it had numerous programmers re-configuring the machine's strategy each day based on what Kasparov did during the day's games.

The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play that were revealed during the course of the match. This allowed the computer to avoid a trap in the final game that it had fallen for twice before.

Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's log files but IBM refused, although the company later published the logs on the Internet. Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM refused and dismantled Deep Blue.

Yeah, the machine will win...my guess is that there is too much money at state here for the computer's developers to let it be defeated by a mere human, and they will cheat if they have to in insuring a victory.

Originally posted by MMPI2

Yeah, the machine will win...my guess is that there is too much money at state here for the computer's developers to let it be defeated by a mere human, and they will cheat if they have to in insuring a victory.

I hope this isn't the case, but the fact that basically this is a giant 30 min commercial for IBM products; does suggest that the machine will win.

Spoilers for those who havent watched it yet!!!!!!!!!

www.crunchgear.com...

I watched the first part (it's airing over 3 days) tonight. Watson did about as I was expecting. I did laugh pretty hard when Ken Jennings answered a question wrong, and then Watson rang in and said the exact same answer Ken had already erred with.

The only 'spoiler' I'll give is that in the first episode, they only get through the first round of Jeopardy, rather than both rounds and the final like normal. (they are going to play only 2 full games spread over the 3 days) I say this because you can save about 8-9 minutes of your life by not watching the dozen commercials and 20 seconds of goodbyes from Trebek at the end of that :p

What the hell would a super computer do with 1million dollars

Who is doing the buzzing? Does the computer buzz in? or is a programmer buzzing in when the computer has an answer?

For anyone interested that couldn't watch the show ....... here is round one of the three part challenge .

-WATSON's winnings went to charity; I forget which one, but on the 3rd episode some IBM spokesman gave a blurb about it. Half the human's winnings went to charity and they pocketed the rest
-WATSON had a mechanical thing that would push the buzzer much like a person would; they showed a picture of it in the first show. Basically, once the computer figured out the answer, it sent a signal to it and then a mechanical finger pushed the buzzer.

I watched the three episodes, and I thought it was really good. I've seen both Jennings and Rutter play before, but I never saw the tournament where they played each other. They also gave a bunch of information about how the computer works, which was cool, if you're into that sort of thing.

BTW, that youtube clip is not the official episode that aired. It looks like a practice match. It's not Jennings and Rutter, anyway.

edit: The only time that humans had to do anything for WATSON during the show itself was to tell it when to pick the next clue, or that it was on a daily double/final jeopardy. Since it can't hear, it had to be done that way to avoid interrupting Trebek or something. The clues were sent to it electronically as text at the same time that the clue was finished being read.