The computer has gained many, many victories over us simple humans for years now.
It can do mostly everything faster and more efficient, and don’t even consider putting a video game on the highest difficulty – you will lose, by hook or by crook.
But I speak from the perspective of someone with mere ordinary intelligence. That’s why when IBM and Jeopardy decided to have a “supercomputer” compete on the show, they chose to match it up against two of the most decorated participants in the show’s history.
Watson, an IBM-created machine filled with tons of facts and information will meet former show contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-day showdown starting tonight.
But Jeopardy isn’t your simple quiz show. Remember, the answer is always a question. So the questions are phrased in a variety of thought-provoking ways, which makes part of the game’s fun (or misery) trying to decipher host Alex Trebek’s questions.
How many times have you watched and frustratedly screamed at your TV, “WHAT IS HE EVEN ASKING ME?!?”
For IBM and Watson, this will go far beyond the realm of fact-based memory. Have they constructed a machine with true intelligence? The Linux-based Watson has 200 million pages of stored information, which helped it win a test round in January against its adversaries.
It will be amazing to see if Watson has the ability to take that stored information and rationalize answers from it based on the language of the questions asked. For example, it had trouble with fill-in-the-blank formatted questions in January.
The most amazing part about this is that the show was taped weeks ago and not one spoiler report has surfaced. Absolutely no one knows what happened besides the people who attended. Remarkable in this day and age and almost makes me think that lives were threatened. I kid (not really).
So whose side are you on? Would you rather see the human brain beat out computer memory, or would you feel accomplished if the human brain created a machine that could – in turn – best the human brain?
WHAT AM I EVEN ASKING YOU?!?
Tags: jeopardy computer, Jeopardy Watson, man vs computer, Watson IBM computer
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