Watson

I watched the “Watson Challenge” on “Jeopardy!” the last couple of nights.

Watson is a computer developed by IBM that, by using plain language recognition and deep information search algorithms, can actually compete like a human contestant in the quiz show “Jeopardy!”

The opponents for Watson were Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, both of whom had won several million dollars playing “Jeopardy!” and are the unchallenged champions of the game. Or at least the unchallenged human champions of the game.

The competition took place over three nights and covered two full rounds of Jeopardy! At stake was $1.5 million dollars. $1 million for the winner, $300 thousand for second and $200 thousand for third.

It was a massacre. Watson crushed the two Champs winning a total of $77,147 over the two rounds compared to Jennings’ $24,000 and Rutter’s $21,600.

It was absolutely amazing to watch the computer convert the quirky “Jeopardy!” clues into answers, which were of course properly phrased as a question, returned in a pleasant, quiet male voice. After a while I thought Alex Trebek was going to start asking Watson about his background and family.

The win was a stunning victory for IBM Research and opens the door for literally thousands of potential applications down the road for this technology. Perhaps the most important potential application would be for medical diagnostics where most of the information is only available in plain language descriptions.

Watson wasn’t perfect and, while he ran roughshod over his two human opponents in the first round, Jennings and Rutter made it a bit of a dogfight in the second round. But, in the end, Watson was unstoppable. Despite occasionally coming up with the wrong answer, and occasionally not being able to isolate the answer before his opponents, it was clear who was king of the hill. The funniest moments came with Watson’s bizarre dollar amounts put up for the Daily Doubles he uncovered. His bets of highly uneven amounts, such as $1,236, brought chuckles from the audience at IBM Research where the shows were taped.

IBM indicated that Watson’s winnings of $1 million would be given to charity and Jennings and Rutter also indicated that they would donate half of their prize money to charity.

It was impressive and a lot of fun as well. Hats off to IBM and hats off to “Jeopardy!” and ABC for taking part in the challenge.