IBM’s Watson is Anything but Elementary
Like geeks everywhere, I was riveted this week to Jeopardy watching the man vs. machine action as we hit an amazing AI milestone – demonstrating the ability of a computer to understand natural language. The results from the show speak for themselves with a combined 2 game scores of scores were $77,147 for Watson, $24,000 for Ken Jennings, and $21,600 for Brad Rutter.
There is of course bound to be some controversy like the issue of Watson having inhumanly fast reflexes when it comes to buzzing in to answer a question, but you can’t help but be impressed with a run like the 2nd night where Watson was an unstoppable clue-deciphering, Jeopardy dominating machine. Must be the Deep Blue Genes from IBM Research (punny enough?).
In the new world order of chess Grand Master humiliating, Genome mapping, Jeopardy smack down capable computers, all we poor meatbags can do is sit back and come up applications for these artificial savant intellects. IBM talked briefly about some of their ideas for the Healthcare and Finance industries and I expect we’ll hear more over the coming months.
I believe that this type of technology will become a significant part of the overall “relevance engine” revolution that’s just getting started. It will take a combination of machine natural language interpretation, real-time searching, identifying who cares about interpreted/translated information, getting it into the right hands, getting it there only when it’s needed, and allowing people to interact with it however they are comfortable (interactive voice, email, smartphones), to get us to a place where the information technology augments and enhances our lives instead of overwhelming it.
This post was written by a huge Jeopardy fan Abbas Haider Ali who wanted to give his thoughts on Watson. Want to read more about Watson find articles here.
I think being enslaved by a trivia obsessed supercomputer would be better than toiling in an insect overlord's sugar mines.
Abbas Haider Ali.
