Can a Computer Win on ‘Jeopardy’?
Defeating a chess champion is a piece of cake compared to parsing puns and analyzing language. Developed over four years at an estimated cost of more than $30 million, IBM’s “Jeopardy”-playing computer, Watson, will face the quiz show’s grand masters, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in two games to be aired Feb. 14, 15 and 16. As Stephen Baker relates in the following excerpt from his new book, “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything,” doubts remain about how well Watson can process the endless subtleties of human language.
Watson paused. The closest thing it had to a face, a glowing orb on a flat-panel screen, turned from forest green to a dark shade of blue. Filaments of yellow and red streamed steadily across it, like the paths of jets circumnavigating the globe. This pattern represented a state of quiet anticipation as the supercomputer awaited the next clue.
It was a September morning in 2010 at IBM Research, in the hills north of New York City, and the computer, known as Watson, was annihilating two humans, both champion-caliber players, in practice rounds of the knowledge game of “Jeopardy.” Within months, it would be playing the game on national TV in a million-dollar man vs. machine match-up against two of the show’s all-time greats.
What I would love to know is if the quiz show’s grand masters, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter are married or dating anyone. I cannot imagine the experience of being in their company each day. Also, wouldn’t they get frustrated with a partner’s lack of intelligence? I would feel like an idiot next to these guys and I actually won the Jeopardy game years ago at my school.
I suspect that they both spend much needed time alone.