IBM Watson

On May 11, 1997, Deep Blue, an IBM computer, defeated Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a game of chess. Today, February 14, 2011, IBM is back to make computing history once again... only this time, the challenge is much more complicated.

Watson is a computer designed to play Jeopardy!, or more specifically to answer questions posed in natural language. To many people this might sound quite similar to searching something on Google, but it is much, MUCH different.

When we search on the web, usually we pick 2 or 3 keywords to generalize our search to something specific. What Watson has to do is take a full sentence, and find the important parts, the keywords, on his own and derive a specific meaning, and then of course pick the right answer. Of course the entire process is much more complicated then what I just described.
And if you consider Jeopardy questions, they often involve either puns or irony and can be sometimes very tricky and confusing, even for a human player.

Also, Watson does NOT use the internet to find information. It uses its own, enormous database filled with any information you can imagine. They must have scanned a ton of content for him, hehe.

Natural language Processing has been a huge computer science challenge ever since the dawn of computers. However there has never been a computer as advanced as Watson, which was able to derive meaning from such complicated sentences with such a precision. Of course, it is not perfect, in fact nowhere near.

"The reality is that being able to win a game at Jeopardy!, doesn't mean you've completely conquered the language understanding task; far from it."

 - Dr. David Ferrucci (Watson Research Lead)

It is true, that Watson is far from the reality of people and computers being able to communicate in a human way, but it is quite a milestone in the development of Artificial Inteligence and Natural Language Processing.

Today, the first round of the Jeopardy challenge was held. Watson is going up against Ken Jennings, the record 74-day former Jeopardy champion, and Brad Rutter, the all-time Jeopardy money winnings leader.

I liked the fact that throughout the show, they included some videos explaining the challenges, development and significance of this project.

During the first half of the show Watson dominated, blowing the 2 humans away, but the second half was a little more sloppy. Watson struggled to find answers for some questions, and even got 4 questions wrong, allowing Brad to catch up.

The final day standings are:

• Ken - $2'000
• Watson - $5'000
• Brad - $5'000

Tomorrow, we will see Round 2 and the Final Jeopardy! round. Make sure you tune in!

The IBM Jeopardy! Challenge

February 14, 15, 16 @ 7:30 pm (CBC in Canada)

Also, in case you are interested in some of Watson's specs:

• 10 Server Cabinets filled with IBM POWER 750 Servers (pictured below)
• 15 Terabytes of RAM
• 2'880 Processor Cores
• Operates at 80 TeraFLOPS (that's 80 trillion operations per second!!!!)

More interesting things about what Watson is and its significance.