Suck It Trebeck - binary style

Talk about celebrity jeopardy, IBM is preparing its own contestant. Once completed, Watson will be a super-computer with one mission: demolish the competition. IBM's newest foray into the world of AI (I guess it still called AI) is a computer that can compete against humans on the TV game show Jeopardy. Now that is a celebrity jeopardy I would want to see.

The challenge is not the data look up, any computer with Internet has access to all the necessary data. The hard part is understanding the questions, I mean answers. It must play on the same terms as the human contestants. To do that, it must parse the question and find keywords, links, analogies, metaphors, play on words, and handle ambiguity just to determine a reasonable search criteria. And once done with that, there may be more then one answer that fits, so it much choose. Not so easy. Especially once you realize that human contestants answer correctly close to 85% of the time and do so quickly. I would be really surprised if it won on its first go, but there is more going on here then simply Jeopardy.

Once a computer can parse Jeopardy clues and remove any ambiguity, that is a huge leap forward in computer human interaction. The classic test of artificial intelligence is the Turing test. Basically, if an ordinary human can have a conversation with a computer and not realize it is a computer, then true AI has been achieved. This is a huge step in that direction, and if IBM is successful, it would have big implications in the world of user interfaces. It isn't to far fetched to think about IBM holding a monopoly on human conversation user interfaces. Imagine saying, "Computer, compile file X", or saying it any number of ways we could say it to another human, and the computer knows exactly what you are talking about. Kinda cool, and kinda scary.



In the seminar class I am taking this semester, we discussed the concept of the singularity: a point where machines get so complex that humans can no longer understand them. People always say that it is only 20 years away, even 20 years ago. Personally, I have a heard time imagining such an event, but this kind of breakthrough starts to make me believe. This isn't chess where there is a fixed number of possible games, this is language. There is nearly an infinite number of ways to phrase things all of which are littered with play on words and ambiguity. Perhaps this is where the singularity originates, or perhaps not. We still have to see how good Watson really is, but I can't wait to see it take on Ken Jennings, and loose.

NYT article