'Jeopardy!' To Pit Humans Against IBM Machine

digitaldc writes "The game show Jeopardy! will pit man versus machine this winter in a competition that will show how successful scientists are in creating a computer that can mimic human intelligence. Two of the venerable game show's most successful champions — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — will play two games against 'Watson,' a computer program developed by IBM's artificial intelligence team. The matches will be spread over three days that will air Feb. 14-16, the game show said on Tuesday. The competition is reminiscent of when IBM developed a chess-playing computer to compete against chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997."

Comments

Why Don't You Play Against It?

[eldavojohn]

A computer will be much better at facts. So it's mostly a question of grammar. And the hardest problem is likely figuring out wordplay, which occasionally comes up in jeopardy.

If you think this is true, you can play against Watson online. About seven years ago, I saw some pretty impressive crossword solvers that were decent at wordplay and I've imagined they've gotten much better at developing novel links between words to exploit puns and the like. Never perfect but slowly getting better in odd ways -- like most of AI.

We've discussed this so many times it hurts. I've wanted to watch this for almost a year, I was hoping Jeopardy! wouldn't need to milk this hype for all it's worth to stay relevant.