Communications of the ACM
Ibm's Jeopardy-Playing Machine Now Beats Human Contestants
IBM's Jeopardy-playing supercomputer is now capable of beating human Jeopardy contestants on a regular basis, but has a ways to go before it takes on the likes of 74-time champion Ken Jennings.
IBM announced plans to build a computer that can win on Jeopardy last April, and expects to stage a public tournament involving human players and the machine within the next year or so.
The question-answering system, nicknamed "Watson", is already doing trial runs against people who have actually appeared on the Alex Trebek-hosted Jeopardy. Watson's competition includes people who qualified for the show but lost, people who appeared and won once, and people who appeared and won twice.
Watson is "working its way up through the ranks," says David Ferrucci, leader of the project team. "We win some, we lose some. Overall, we're quite competitive but there's a ways to go to play the top of the top."
The games are played at IBM's "Watson Research Center" in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., with a real stage and professional host--though not Alex Trebek. Questions are provided by Jeopardy, and the computer--about the size of eight refrigerators--is seen behind a glass window while the two human contestants are at podiums.
The computer has an advantage when it comes to ringing in on questions. Anyone who's seen Jeopardy knows that human contestants can struggle with timing when buzzing in after questions. Watson has great reaction speed.
But the Watson development team faces many challenges in creating a robotic Jeopardy champion. Without being connected to the Internet, the computer has to understand natural language, determine the answer to a question (or, in the case of Jeopardy, the question to an answer), and then calculate the odds that its answer is correct in order to decide whether it is worth buzzing in.
From NetworkWorld
View Full Article
No entries found