Probably not the most political story of the day, but still pretty damn interesting.
Back in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue made headlines when it beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six game chess match. Reminiscent of that, IBM and the producers of "Jeopardy!" have announced that the two most successful players in the show's history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, will be challenged by "Watson" (named after the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson) over the course of three episodes that will air in February.
Hopefully they'll have all the kinks worked out to where there's no possibility of Trebek doing something that'll make it go all Skynet on us, and begin the hunt for Sarah Connor.
In a news release, the companies said the format of "Jeopardy" was "the ultimate challenge" for "Watson" because "the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not."
I.B.M. and the show’s producers have agreed that $1 million will be on the line. If "Watson" wins, all of the money will be donated to charity. If one of the humans wins, half of the money will be donated.
"Jeopardy" producers said the computer qualified for the show by passing the same test that human contestants must pass. Lately "Watson" has been playing games with former "Jeopardy" contestants for practice. I.B.M. will share some of the highlights of those games on its Web site in the coming weeks.
Some of you are probably wondering how this is different from what a search engine does? In order for this to work, Watson has to be capable of what the computers in "Star Trek" do when asked a question by one of the crew. It has to recognize & understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — "natural language," and then, instead of just pointing someone in the direction of web pages where the information requested might exist, it has to pick out a definitive answer from the information available to it.
From the N.Y. Times:
Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled "Jeopardy!" because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.
With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV.
Intelligent machines have been a staple of science fiction for a good while. It's not yet at HAL 9000 level intelligence, but they're working on it. Already, there are some predicting Japan will be using robots to replace 3.5 million workers by 2025. Japan's fertility rate is below what's necessary to keep their population stable, meaning a smaller pool of human workers & a ballooned elderly population over the next 20 years. So, instead of opening the doors to more immigration, the Japanese have been developing robot workers to do everything from healthcare work to possibly short-order cook.
For example, a couple years back Wired had a report on robots developed at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology creating music.
These robots, developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, listen to humans creating music in real time and play along with them. One might say they improvise.
They can't pass the actual Turing test, in which a robot must fool a human into thinking it is also a human during a conversation. But musical improvisation is another kind of a conversation and I, a human, would believe that the impromptu, non-predetermined parts these robots play were played by other humans..... the process is somewhat analogous to the way Deep Blue plays chess: by carefully examining its options and then evolving them like biological species to see which one best fits a changing musical environment.