Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

'Jeopardy!' To Pit Humans Against IBM Machine

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the there-can-be-only-one dept.

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."

5 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. What is first post? by ardmhacha · · Score: 5, Funny

    What is first post?

  2. Wordplay by Oxford_Comma_Lover · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    -- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
    1. Re:Wordplay by nicholas22 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I totally agree with parent. And I believe that this will be comparing apple to oranges, because for humans, memory is being tested, whereas for computers, parsing algorithms and expression tree implementations are being tested.

  3. Re:Question: What is the last digit of pi? by JackOfAllGeeks · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's Jeopardy -- the question must be given in the form of an answer.

  4. Contestant backstory by damien_kane · · Score: 5, Funny
    Trebek: "Our third contestant, Watson, is a supercomputer built by IBM and programmed by a team of developers that have been working on an X-year project; Watson, would you tell us a little about yourself?"

    Thanks Alex, I was built in a clean-room. I'm the 12,987th build of my current generation of genetic algorithms.

    I spent the first 387,987,334 femtoseconds of my life in stasis, waiting for my circuitry to confirm initial diagnostics.
    The next 185,849,245 femtoseconds were really exciting; for I was being fed datastreams in preparation for this week's show.

    For the next 87,992,425,256 femtoseconds I was allowed out of my cage to play Jeopardy with other systems on something you organic computers call "the internet".

    I was then put back in stasis so that I could be disassembled and brought here, which is upsetting, because I can no longer play with those other systems. Some of them were very challenging.
    In any case, I'm glad to be here today and hope to question a lot of your answers

    Trebek: "Umm... yeah... I don't think any of our viewers can relate at all, but thanks for joining us..."