IBM on Wednesday pitted its expert in TV shows, odd cultural factoids and 11-letter words against members of the Chattanooga Technology Council and assembled students in Chattanooga’s SIMCenter .
It was no contest, with IBM’s expert beating the crowd to the punch almost every time.
More importantly, the demonstration represented IBM’s bid to change the way people and computers interact, a goal that could reverberate throughout the business world, according to Eric Brown, who works on the project’s systems team.
“While playing ‘Jeopardy’ is fun and interesting, we’re trying to see how technology like this can help in the real world,” Brown said.
Watson, an IBM computer, is the successor to IBM’s Deep Blue, the device that in 1997 defeated reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov.
IBM’s team has been testing Watson, a “DeepQA” project that consists of more than 2,500 processors to question-answering technology, against real “Jeopardy” players from the TV show – with surprising results, Brown said.
“The average ‘Jeopardy’ winner answers about 45 percent of questions and gets about 90 percent of them right,” Brown said.
As of the latest test, Watson scores in that same range, which means it’s able to both unravel the twists and turns of the English language and answer a question.
YouTube video on the “Watson” system
By using natural language to analyze, research and answer a question with confidence in less than three seconds, Watson could be very useful for help health professionals, government, businesses and scientists, Brown said.
“The team is starting to look for more applications already,” he said, but that will have to wait until after the computer competes on “Jeopardy” with opponents there.
“Jeopardy” has announced plans to produce a human vs. machine competition. Howard Stringer, chairman, CEO and president of Sony Corp., said he is “delighted to be able to expand the form and the possibilities through this exciting new project.”
Watson will not be connected to the Internet or have any outside assistance when it competes on the show.
The only limitation is the computing power necessary to make Watson work.
Answering a question takes two hours on a single 2.6 gigahertz PC, Brown said, which “would make for a very boring ‘Jeopardy’ game.”
IBM will continue testing Watson this fall, with 50 to 60 “sparring matches” against former “Jeopardy” Tournament of Champions winners.