I For One Welcome Our New Computer Overlords

Ken Jennings provides us a much needed quote for the three-day man against machine Jeopardy! when he jokingly writes "I For One Welcome our New Computer Overlords" below his answer to the final jeopardy clue. With or without our welcome, Watson has arrived. It bested the best human players ever in Jeopardy! namely Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson is a harbinger of what's going to come from Big Blue: truly intelligent machine that can augment or replace human intelligence.

What is Toronto?????

Watson is such an abomination.  Or at least some super computer afflicted with savant syndrome?  Despite his excessive smartness which is unlike any average American, and like many Americans young or old, he is very bad at geography and can't tell Toronto is not an American city.  In an effort to make light of his own lack of common sense, he does what teenagers do best--abusing punctuations, adding extra question marks at the end of his answer or question.  His equally robotic human contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter got the answer or question correct. (I know it's confusing.  In Jeopardy! one has to phase the answer as a question so the question is the answer.)  Human kind still has hope.

Man vs Machine: Jeopardy!

While Apple, Google, Facebook and twitter are grabbing eyeballs and even credited for toppling regimes, IBM is quietly building a machine that can play Jeopardy! (to win some prize money to offset the dismal sales ...) Watson made its official debut yesterday and played a game of Jeopardy! with two of the most celebrated contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. According to pcmag , Watson has specifications like below:

• 90 IBM Power 750 servers enclosed in 10 racks
• 16 Terabytes of memory
• A 2,880 processor core
• Linux system
• While not officially disclosed by IBM, Watson is estimated to have cost $1-$2 billion
• Uses "DeepQA": a technology that enables computer systems to directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge

All of these are just (futile) attempts to match the human brain which according to IBM researchers can fit inside a shoe box and is powered by a tuna sandwich.

The result of the three-day contest is a well guarded secret. But my bet is Watson will win on the third day.

More on Watson from Big Blue.