IBM Watson WINS human Jeopardy enemies

Wrapping up a three-day run on jeopardy game show, IBM Watson computer has beaten two former champions in a match against the town of man machine.

Execution has successfully demonstrated not only that a computer can beat humans in a quiz question of curiosity, but, above all, it shows how the computer can answer questions much like people, potentially opening up a new form of human/computer interaction.

In the final episode of game two-and three nights pre-recorded, Watson had saw competition, accumulating US $ 77,147 in winnings over the two Jeopardy champions played, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Rutter scored $ 21,600 and Jennings scored $ 24,000. Watson took the prize sample of 1 million dollars, that IBM will donate to charity.

Managed by Sony Pictures Television, danger is a longtime U.S. television game where three contestants compete to answer questions of curiosity, divided into multiple categories and sorts of difficulties growing. Contestants are given an average of about 5 seconds to answer a question.

Researchers at IBM spent four years building Watson. The machine can process trillions of 80 (teraflops) operations per second. Runs approximately 2800 processor core and has 16 terabytes of memory.

Construction of such a system to play on the danger has proved to be a huge project, a much more challenging to build a supercomputer-play chess, that IBM did in the 1990s.

"It is a very different kind of problem. Chess was very challenging for the time because of mathematics. This was a very different type of program, "said Watson lead manager David Ferrucci, in an IBM viewing party held in New York to show Wednesday. "There's more problem or a space. You are dealing with ambiguity and contextual nature of language. "

On the software side, the machine uses Apache Hadoop distributed file system and the Apache UIMA (unstructured information Management Architecture), a framework for the analysis of unstructured data. Perhaps the most useful software, however, is a program of natural language processing called DeepQA that IBM supports phrase human can understand. This program is Watson what differentiates a typical search engine, which just might return a results list of a set of keywords.

The questions were recruited Watson from the text; It has used speech recognition technology. For these tours, Jeopardy avoided questions involving audio or video snippets. Watson, however, answer questions in a synthesized voice.

To build a body of knowledge for Watson, researchers have accumulated 200 million pages of content, both structured and unstructured, across 4 terabytes of disks. It looks for matches and then uses rules to approximately 6 million euro to determine the best answers. When a query is specified, the software analyzes initially, identifying any names, dates, geographical locations or other entities. In addition, it examines the sentence structure and grammar of the question for hints of what you're asking the question.

The first night of jeopardy game, held on Monday, both man and machine seemed to be on equal footing, with Watson tied with Rutter $ 5,000 and Jennings followed with $ 2000. From Tuesday, however, Watson has started to show muscles: Watson has led the evening with $ 35,734, Rutter followed with $ 10,400 and Jennings towed $ 4800.

On Wednesday, the machine scored well above the man competitors, thanks not only to his immense body of knowledge, but also for algorithms researchers have put in place to make the best bets. To twice daily, one question hidden special where the competitor is allowed to bet any amount of its companies, Watson bet a seemingly arbitrary 2127 $, a number that the public found it funny.

These computerized wages "are seemingly random to us mere mortals," says Ferrucci. "But what is happening in reality is that it is considering its confidence in the category. Also where is considering what is at stake, how far ahead or behind you forward, how much money still can potentially be won or lost. All that adds up to a rather complex calculation. Get the numbers that are optimized for this precision down. "

While Watson performed flawlessly in many cases, it was also capable of flubs also casual Jeopardy watchers could laugh. Show on Tuesday, when asked for the largest airport in the U.S. take a hero of World War II, he responded with Toronto, the name of a Canadian city. Show on Wednesday asking question lost the name of a known reference book, "the elements of style". This question, Watson was inscrutably and confidently replied "Dorothy Parker".

While IBM has no plan for revenge or a version 2 of Watson, Watson mean technology in various fields such as health, where, through a specific body of knowledge, could answer tough questions.

"I think Watson has the potential to transform the way that people interact with computers," said Jennifer Chu-Carroll, an IBM researcher working for the project, told Computerworld. "Watson is a significant step, allowing people to interact with a computer as they would a human being. Watson does not give you a list of documents to go through but offers the user a reply ".

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and General technology breaking news for the IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @ Joab_Jackson. E-mail address of Joab is Joab_Jackson@idg.com