Supercomputer Watson beats humans in TV question and answer contest

Watson, the lastsupercomputercreated by IBM, haslivestockto the best contestants ofJeopardy! , the popular American television trivia game. After a long preliminary stage of training, on February 14, 15 and 16, 2011Watson tested his? intelligence? live on a national network in front of the two most important champions of the contest. After three days of competition,Watson He beat his opponents for a total of $ 77,147 in 3 days, followed at some distance by contestants Ken Jennings, with $ 24,000, and Brad Rutter, who finished third with 21,600. And that despite the fact thatWatson he was especially slow and repeated some mistakes his teammates had made.

Watson, named after the former president of the company, Thomas Watson, is aDeepQA implementation,a system ofartificial intelligence created by IBM to answer questions about any domain of human knowledge.

The machines had already shown that they can be superior to the human being in chess, scrabble and other board games. But this time it wasn’t about logic and strategy, it was aboutdecipher the real meaning of a question asked in colloquial language. “For the past four years, a team of IBM scientists has worked to meet a challenge: build a computer that would challenge the human ability to answer questions asked in natural language with speed, precision and confidence,” they say from IBM.

The effort has paid off. In the popular television game show,Watson has shown that it isable to interpret double meanings, ironies and puns, as well as perceiving thenuances of ambiguous language depending on contextFor example, distinguishing the “bank” in which people sit from the “bank” in which the money is kept. With 13.64 terabites of memory and multiple servers, its best tool for finding the answer to every question was the ability to “dive” in just milliseconds through the more than 200 million pages of material it stores.