IBM working on Jeopardy challenge

Posted: May 30th, 2009 | Author: Alex | Filed under: Artificial Intelligence | No Comments »

IBM recently announced Watson, a computer system with the purpose to defeat human participants in the game of Jeopardy.

As the New York Times reports:

In a demonstration match here at the I.B.M. laboratory against two researchers recently, Watson appeared to be both aggressive and competent, but also made the occasional puzzling blunder.

For example, given the statement, “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide,” Watson beat its human competitors by quickly answering, “What is Lebanon?”

Moments later, however, the program stumbled when it decided it had high confidence that a “sheet” was a fruit.

The goal is to have Watson successfully compete against human Jeopardy champions. Qualification matches will apparently begin later this year.

Fascinating. Jeopardy uses data from a broad range of literature, popular culture, history, politics, and so forth. These are areas of human interest. People can often effortlessly rise to the challenge of answering questions, even if they involve puns, temporal relations, rhymes or other hurdles. This is a much tougher problem for computers.

It’s a game in which according to IBM the best players provide correct answers more than 85% of the time. Educated guessing can be useful, but on the other hand, successful players also need to know, when they simply do not know the answer and should not risk giving a wrong one. It is also not enough to be able to answer a question; the question needs to be answered before other players manage to do so.

It should be very interesting to observe progress of this project. If successful, this could push the envelope in natural language processing, search and reasoning as well as influence applications in areas of business and life.

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