Hasta La Gadget!

IBM, whose ‘Deep Blue’ supercomputer took on and beat grandmaster Gerry Kasparov in chess, has a new challenge: “Jeopardy”. The company’s “Watson” supercomputer will take on human contestants as early as this fall, The New York Times reports.

The challenge is considered to be a difficult one because of the complexities of natural larguage parsing, pop cultrual references, and wordplay, all of which are hallmarks of the “Jeopardy” stable of questions.

The so-called Watson “Question Answering System” has been under development for more than three years, according to IBM. Like its human opponents, it is isolated, and not allowed to connect to the Internet. It receives its input via a text message.

Watson, a roomful of servers, apparently convincingly beat its human opponents. “Over the rest of the day, Watson went on a tear, winning four of six
games,” the Times reported. “It displayed remarkable facility with cultural trivia (‘This
action flick starring Roy Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was
also briefly a TV series” — ‘What is ‘Blue Thunder”?’), science (‘The
greyhound originated more than 5,000 years ago in this African country,
where it was used to hunt gazelles’– ‘What is Egypt?’)” and so on.

Watson’s secret? Its database, its speed, and its more than a hundred algorithms, which parse  a question in different ways, generating hundreds of possible
solutions. But it also has room for improvement; the story talks about its weird fixation with Tommy Lee Jones, for example.