IBM Watson Hits Jeopardy to Destroy All Humans
It's not self aware... yet.
IBM designed a computer that could beat a chess player. While a computer-run chess program isn't new, it was an achievement for a program to best the best chess player in the world.
Now more than a decade later, IBM has set out to own the game show of trivia known as Jeopardy. IBM and the game show have teamed up to deliver a special charity edition of the show where the top two human Jeopardy players faced off against IBM's Watson supercomputer and program.
The final show off is hitting the networks tonight, but the results are in and the machine beat out the humans. It was a convincing victory, but Watson still showed clearly that it was a machine more than an advanced human neural network.
On the first night, Watson tied for the lead with a human at $5000. The second night, Watson took a commanding lead with a score of $35,734 to $10,400 for Brad Rutter and $4,800 for Ken Jennings. The lead was stunning, but Watson also faltered when it gave the question of Toronto when the answer asked for a U.S. city. Oops.
Turn on the telly if you want to see puny humans getting served by machine, or check back later for the final tally.
Find out more about Watson on IBM's YouTube channel.
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Good one & about time they started to make these computers more efficient...On the downside though,they had to have more than one computer linked together to give all these answers...So really it was not a fair game standard...Should of been one PC type of computer compared to the single human brains on their own...
Just to add one more thing,I heard about how they had used networked linked computers on the TV news the other night...
@Wish I Was Wealthy: Sure thing, and the human brain isn't billions of processors working in parallel, nope.
That's not how information processing works.
Come on Spelli,you should know this by now...A human brain is heaps of brain cells linked to each other,just like the SSD's are with their many SLC's or MLC's (SLC stands for Single Line Cell & you can quess the other)...Now the cpu has to retreive all this information from the SSD that is linked up to it from somewhere else in the computer case...Where as our brain works in unison,every thing that we have is up there stuck in our heads...But on Jeopardy they had to link this computer to many other computers to out do those two men with just one head each...
Afaik the human brain is capable of far more information processing than Watsons two racks. The difference is that most of our power goes towards vision and hearing etc. while Watson concentrates fully on the search. They even hat to feed it the clues in text form. Then again, speech processing wasn't part of the challenge and is not so important for real world applications of the system.
@wish:
SLC is Single LEVEL Cell.
It was one computer, albeit in multiple "cases" as are many super computers.
With 16TB of ram, I doubt much of it is pulled off disk, even if it's solid state. 3 seconds of calculation time doesn't give you enough time to service the millions of requests watson must make each second. And in fact, after a quick google, only 4TB of data is stored on disk, which I'm almost certain would be loaded into the RAM at runtime..