By Melissa Maerz
Los Angeles Times
NEW YORK – Will supercomputers one day crush our puny mortal brains? Some scientists at IBM believe it’s possible. And if they have their way, it will start Monday night.
Beginning on Valentine’s Day, an IBM-engineered machine named Watson will compete in a three-night, two-game stretch on “Jeopardy!,” battling all-star champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Only one will emerge as interspecies overlord, but with 10 refrigerator-sized racks of IBM Power 7 Systems firing its mega-mind, Watson’s got a pretty good shot. When IBM staged a practice round with Jennings and Rutter before a group of journalists, Watson won. Asked if he was nervous about the next big match, Rutter evoked “The Terminator,” joking, “I will be (nervous) when Watson’s progeny comes back from the future to kill me.”
Watson’s not that threatening yet – but Rutter has good reason to worry about his opponent. Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, this industrial behemoth is the world’s most sophisticated question-answering system, capable of analyzing puns, riddles and other linguistic complexities that traditionally have been the province of flesh-and-blood nerds. Much more than a glorified search engine, it doesn’t just match key-word searches with links – like the calm-voiced computer on “Star Trek,” it actually answers questions itself. Armed with vast databases of encyclopedias, plays, textbooks, dictionaries and other reference materials (for accuracy’s sake, it doesn’t use the Internet), Watson can respond to clues with the same speed, ear for irony and knowledge of obscure Lady Gaga trivia as an old-fashioned Homo sapien.