Have you heard the one about the two geeks, the supercomputer, and the Jeopardy challenge?
Yeah I thought you might have caught wind of the charming little story of two men going “toe-to-toe” with Watson – IBM’s newest Jeopardy-playing supercomputer. Round one was Monday night, and Watson certainly did not disappoint finishing the opening frame in first place by $3000.
Actually, check that. Watson’s a computer, nay a “supercomputer”, so big in fact that the show had to move the set to New York where it could be accommodated with a room of its own off stage – and it only crawled out to a $3000 lead? Are you kidding me? Is this really what IBM wants to hang the collective fortune and faith of its shareholders on? A supercomputer that is only narrowly more Jeopardy-intelligent than two dudes with buzzers and scarce social graces?
I suppose Watson’s human counterparts should be commended (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter). Perhaps I have come at this story all wrong. Maybe this is truly a testament to the power of the human mind. Hanging with a computer with the processing power of “2800 powerful computers” is actually pretty impressive. Hell, its freaking unbelievable. This isn’t the MIT computer program Bobby Fischer defeated some thirty-plus years ago – before he went off the reservation and turned Anti-American, Anti-Semitic, and Anti-everything else. This is the masterwork of IBM for crying out loud; and they spent years designing it for this specific purpose. Ignoring whether such an investment of time and resources was really a sound business decision for IBM, a human hanging with this thing is pretty remarkable.
I can’t say that I’ll watch round two or even round three. Actually, I can’t even remember the last time I watched the show. That said, I will be pulling for the humans. If you’re an IBM shareholder, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you did not.
The man vs. computer face-off won’t be complete, however, until the final rounds of the extended trivia game show are aired on Tuesday and Wednesday.
IBM trumpets Watson, which has been in development for years and has the processing power of 2,800 “powerful computers,” as a major advancement in machines’ efforts to understand human language. The computer receives clues through digital texts and then buzzes in against the two other “Jeopardy!” contestants like any other player would. It juggles dozens of lines of reasoning at once and tries to arrive at a smart answer.
