Who would you put your money on winning a game of Jeopardy – longest winning-streak record holder Ken Jennings, biggest all-time money winner Brad Rutter or, an artificial intelligence computer system named Watson? Well, you might be surprised to learn that the computer won.
Watson is named after IBM’s first president Thomas J. Watson, which is appropriate as Watson was built by IBM. According to IBM’s website, “Watson is an application of advanced Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Machine Learning technologies to the field of open-domain question answering. At its core, Watson is built on IBM’s DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring”. Unlike supercomputers that can simply store a wealth of knowledge, Watson can operate on human terms, instead of just computer terms.
Watson does not pull information from the internet, as all of the information is self-contained. Watson has a 4 terabytes, or over 200 million pages of content including encyclopaedias, dictionaries, thesauri, literary works, other reference materials and the entire text of Wikipedia.
It is estimated that Watson contains over $3 million in hardware including ninety IBM Power 750 servers, POWER7 processor cores, and 16 terabytes of RAM.
During the Jeopardy game, Watson was given clues electronically in the form of text. Watson would then parse the text into keywords and sentence fragments used to find statistically related phrases. It rapidly and simultaneously executed thousands of proven language analysis algorithms to find potential answers, then selected probable answers based on the number of algorithms that independently found the same answer. A few of the most probable answers were then checked against reference material in order to figure out which answer made the most sense, and if the likelihood of the answer being correct was high enough to answer the question. During the Jeopardy game, Watson typically responded faster than the humans.
On Watson’s first match, which was broadcast on February 14th, the game initially seemed to be close, with Watson, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings having $5000, $5000 and $2000 respectively after the first round. However, during the Double Jeopardy round, Watson developed a large lead.
In the final Jeopardy round, Watson was the only contestant to answer the question incorrectly. The category for final Jeopardy was “U.S. Cities” and the clue was “Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle”, to which Watson responded “What is Toronto?”. The word “U.S.” did not appear in the clue, and the incorrect response “Toronto” came from there being cities in the U.S. named Toronto and Toronto having a baseball team in the American league. Despite this mistake, Watson won with a total of $35, 734 compared to Jennings and Rutter with totals of $4,800 and $10,400 respectively.
A second match was played which brought the scores to $77, 147 for Watson, $24,000 for Jennings and $21,600 for Rutter. Watson ended up winning $1 million, and IBM decided to donate 100% of the winnings to charity. In the future, IBM hopes to implement similar question answering technology for applications in medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support.
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