Supercomputer Beats Humans In US Gameshow
2:31pm UK, Thursday February 17, 2011
Lulu Sinclair, Sky News Online
An IBM super computer has beaten two human rivals on the US game show Jeopardy.
The machine - cleverer even than the Deep Blue machine that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997 - is to be used for medical research in the hopes that its linguistic and analytical abilities may help develop new products.
The supercomputer - known as Watson after Thomas Watson the former president of IBM - used its encyclopedic knowledge of a huge range of topics to beat two human competitors on the popular US quiz show Jeopardy! in a three-day contest.
Although it won the game, Watson was not infallible, getting mixed up with actor James Foxx and Beethoven at one stage and insisting that the Latin word for end was finis, rather than terminus.
Experts say the computer, capable of performing 80 trillion operations per second, is particularly special because it can find answers from ambiguous questions, although it does still seem to get a little muddled.
The question: "It's a poor workman who blames these" was answered by "What are tools?"
It also managed to repeat other contestants' mistakes - and did not laugh at the presenter's jokes, indicating a sense of humour has yet to be part of the programme.
The human rivals were generous in defeat. Ken Jennings, who won 74 games in a row during the show's 2004-2005 season was the runner up, while Brad Rutter came third.
"I for one welcome our new computer overlords!" Jennings conceded.
The contest was staged as a way of IBM, which is 100 this year, letting the world know it is still at the forefront of technology, even though Google and Apple are the industry's favourites at the moment.
Source: http://news.sky.com
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