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IBM's Program WATSON Challenges Human Champions

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WATSON

IBM's Watson system beat two former Jeopardy! game show champions on television February 14-16, 2011. Details of the Match in the NY Times story Computer Wins on Jeopardy!: Trivial, It's Not. (Feb. 17, 2011).

Other Stories on Watson in Chronological Order

CCC Blog on David Ferrucci's Keynote Address at the 2011 ACM Meeting (June 7th, 2011) by Erwin Gianchandani. Insights of particular interest to computer scientists on some of the technical aspects of Watson's success and its major blunder.

What's Next For IBM's Watson: It's bringing its superior analytic power to every kind of business. (March 14, 2011). Forbes Magazine. By Fred Balboni. "For every industry, and for every enterprise, Watson embodies the power of massively scaled analytics. It underscores an idea that ... that in the new world of Watson you shouldn't be asking, "What is our hardest problem?" You should be asking, "What is our greatest possibility?" "

Machines Beat Us At Our Own Game: What Can We Do?. (February 17, 2011) Associated Press, on NPR. "...Watson's victory leads to the question: What can we measly humans do that amazing machines cannot do or will never do? The answer, like all of "Jeopardy!," comes in the form of a question: Who — not what — dreamed up Watson? While computers can calculate and construct, they cannot decide to create. So far, only humans can."

My Puny Human Brain: Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer. (Feb. 16, 2011), SLATE, By Ken Jennings. "...I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine.

Supercomputer creator: Our machine can win Jeopardy!. (16 February 2011), New Scientist, by Justin Mullins. Interview with David Ferrucci, head of the semantic analysis and integration department at IBM's Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York before the final contest was shown.

Smartest Machine on Earth (Feb. 9, 2011), PBS TV. A one-hour NOVA program on the development of Watson.

Building Watson - A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project. (December 13, 2010). YouTube Video on some of the technical aspects of the Watson program, with links to other videos.

Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project Overview article by D.Ferrucci, et al. on some technical aspects of the Watson program -downloadable pdf file - (2010). "Our results strongly suggest that DeepQA is an effective and extensible architecture that can be used as a foundation for combining, deploying, evaluating, and advancing a wide range of algorithmic techniques to rapidly advance the field of question answering (QA)."

What Is I.B.M.’s Watson? By CLIVE THOMPSON, NY Times, (June 16, 2010). Some background on Watson's strengths and weaknesses, written several months before the challenge match. "For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide. "

At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday. By James Fallows. The New York Times (December 26, 2004; reg. req'd.). "Suddenly, the computer world is interesting again. ... The most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated in the newly sexy field of 'search.' ... [T]oday's subject is the virtually unpublicized search strategy of another industry heavyweight: I.B.M. ... I.B.M. says that its tools will make possible a further search approach, that of 'discovery systems' that will extract the underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is structured (databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video files) or even what language it is in. The specific means for doing so involve steps that will raise suspicions among many computer veterans. These include 'natural language processing,' computerized translation of foreign languages and other efforts that have broken the hearts of artificial-intelligence researchers through the years. But the combination of ever-faster computers and ever-evolving programming allowed the systems I saw to succeed at tasks that have beaten their predecessors. ... ... Jennifer Chu-Carroll of I.B.M. demonstrated a system called Piquant, which analyzed the semantic structure of a passage and therefore exposed 'knowledge' that wasn't explicitly there. After scanning a news article about Canadian politics, the system responded correctly to the question, 'Who is Canada's prime minister?' even though those exact words didn't appear in the article."