By Daniel Kohn
With the category of “US Cities” and the clue ” Its largest airport is named for a world war II hero; its second largest, for a world war II battle” and his wrong answer of “What is Toronto???????” Watson still outperformed its human competitors in Jeopardy! this past week. I think Ken Jennings note (below) might be a bit premature
but I am really impressed with Waton’s technology. I still have many technical questions, but for the most part it is a very impressive attempt at understanding natural human communication. Watson’s ability to pick out the most important information and be able to play Jeopardy does signal that computers are coming that will rival HAL in 2001 (although hopefully without the murdering part).
I see, very soon, that Watson could be broken down into component programs that people could run over the internet, similar to how Folding at Home or Seti at Home works now, but in Watson’s case, each computer would run a part of Watson’s “Intelligence” and as people need the processing power, it is spread out over the computers on the net running the Watson@home software. But in this case, it could also use the internet as its database (Watson on Jeopardy was NOT connected to the internet). Think of the what could be done with this technology, especially when harnessed with Voice Recognition software on a local computer. IBM (the makers of Watson) could take search to the next level and be the next Google.
Am I saying that the question of Artificial Intelligence has been solved…..NO! But this is a significant leap forward that will have a profound effect on computer technology for years, maybe even decades to come.