IBM’s Watson Beats out Human Rivals

IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, won $1 Million, and beat out two of the best Jeopardy players in history after a 3 night marathon.

Watson was able to accumulate $77,147 during the game, while Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings collected $24,000 and Brad Rutter a mere $21,600.

Ken Jennings is known to have won a total of 74 consecutive games, a record for Jeopardy and Brad Rutter has totaled a record $3 Million on the game, but none of them were a match for Artificial Intelligence. Watson’s win was much more than about money for IBM, who hopes to use Watson as a way to usher in new machines that will understand what humans really need, according to BBC News.

On Finale night, IBM signed a deal with Nuance to “explore, develop and commercialize” Watson’s abilities to scan and analyze information quickly could eventually help doctors to diagnose their patients in a shorter amount of time.

“We can transform the way that health care professionals accomplish everyday tasks by enabling them to work smarter and more efficiently,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, director of research at IBM and senior vice president to BBC News.

Although Watson was anticipated to do well, he wasn’t really expected to win because many of the Jeopardy questions rely on nuances and riddles, which human are good at but computers are not. According to PC World, Watson took four years of research to build, and in order to make him knowledgeable, IBM gathered about 200 million pages of content across 4 terabytes of disk. The machine searches for matches and then uses about 6 million logic rules to statistically assess the best answer. When given a question, Watson’s software analyzes it, picks out any names, dates, or geographic locations, and identifies any grammatical structures in the question to better answer it.

About This Author

Rosa is a professional journalist who holds a minor in Communications (print journalism), as well as a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in International Affairs. We are extremely pleased that she has joined out team.

Comments are closed