IBM Watson dominates Jeopardy contest day 2

Supercomputer IBM Watson blew away the competition on Tuesday evening during his indictment showdown with former game show samples of Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The computer was able to respond 13 clues of danger first 15 practically uncontested, with a single response going to Jennings and another problem that all three competitors missed. Watson ended transmission with $ 35,734, followed by Rutter in $ 10,400 $ 4800 and Jennings. Competitors will square off again on Wednesday night for a final battle.

Watson screams back Next

There seemed to be that some hope that Rutter and Jennings would be able to compete effectively against Watson during the second part of the risk of round Monday. Watson has begun to stumble upon the most advanced and wordplay ended Monday, tied with $ 5000 each Rutter.

But Watson and his 13.64 terabytes of memory got the job done quickly during the broadcast of Tuesday and ruthless, too. Unlike Monday's show, Watson played aggressively, pointing to big money problems especially round of double criminality. Value of the clue of the highest, the harder the wordplay tends to be.

The first 15 clues were indicative of how the rest of the game, went with Watson that dominates the rest of the game.

Watson takes a guess?

Watson has surprised the audience during the second Daily Double clue when the computer was not sure of the answer but risky guess anyway. Watson is not supposed to answer unless its level of certainty passes a threshold (based on a percentage) dubbed "Watson" buzz. "

The threshold is not a fixed and floating value depending on level of symptom distress. Watson was 32% in certain of the correct answer, but that was well below the threshold of buzz that clue. Thus faced with the prospect of losing money if it has not responded (just the contestant who collects the Daily Double clue may respond), the computer went with his best guess was correct.

The indication of danger Watson guessed on was, "the old lion of Nimrud ' gone missing from the National Museum of the city in 2003 (along with a lot of other things)". The answer was "what is Baghdad?"

Back to Google Maps for Watson

Watson shot again in danger of ending where the computer has wagered only $ 947. All three contestants were asked to identify a city with two airports: one named after a hero of World War II and another after a battle of World War II. The correct answer was Chicago, and both human competitors responded correctly. Watson, on the other hand, he replied "Toronto" and it was highly uncertain of its response. It seems that somehow the computer failed to realize that the category, the city of the United States, would help to narrow his choices. You can check out IBM'S take on what went wrong on the blog of a smarter planet.

Whatever the shortcomings of Watson's IBM super computer was dominant against human opponents. Now, it all boils down to the transmission of Wednesday evening when Jennings and Rutter attempts to battle and overcome Commander again lead Watson.

Connect with Ian Paul (@ ianpaul) and Today @ PCWorld on Twitter for the latest technology news and analysis.

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