Still from a practice round involving "Watson" and Ken Jennings
In February, the popular television game show Jeopardy will put the skills of some of its top champions such as Ken Jennings (winner of over a million dollars on the show) against a computer. The IBM computer, which they have nicknamed “Watson” (presumably after the intelligent sidekick to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character), has the ability to intake spoken data, parse out the pertinent information, determine the question at hand, signal when it has an answer, then give its response audibly through speakers using the English language.
This isn’t the first time IBM has put its artificial intelligence into competition against human opponents. In May 1997, their Deep Blue computer was matched up against world champion chess player Garry Kasparov. The chess match went 6 games, with the super computer winning 2 and losing 1, with the other three games ending in a stalemate.
February 14th marks the beginning of the contest on Jeopardy, and while that’s not likely to be the type of Valentine’s Day gift a lady is hoping for (or most men), in addition to the almighty DVR to allow you to watch it at a later date, the battle between Man and Machine is a three night affair, starting the 14th and going for three days through the 16th.
