By "humans," of course, I mean Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two men who on the one hand are the greatest champions in the history of "Jeopardy" and who on the other just ended up getting their butts handed to them at the game by a computer that didn't even seem to know that Toronto isn't in the United States.
In case you were somehow in a cabin in the mountains with no Internet access and no TV over the last few weeks and don't know what I'm talking about, I'm referring of course to the latest IBM Grand Challenge--Big Blue's development of a supercomputer known as Watson that was intended to be able to beat the world's best "Jeopardy" players at a game centered around one of the biggest problems in computing: understanding and parsing natural language.
Over the last three days, Watson's battle against Jennings and Rutter played out on national TV in a two-game match. May the best, er, man win.
Though I wasn't able to be in the room at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., when the matches were played last month, I did get invited to the final night party this evening at IBM's Almaden Research Center here, and let me tell you, though I was in a roomful of actual human beings, not many of them shared my preference for a contestant with DNA. These folks were definitely in Watson's corner, tinny text-to-speech voice and all.
In the end, they all got the last laugh. As you've no doubt heard by now, Watson out and out dominated Jennings and Rutter, finishing the two games with a total of $77,147, more than the two humans' $24,000 (Jennings) and $21,600 (Rutter) combined.
So I guess Jennings' tongue-in-cheek comment "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords," which he wrote along with his Final Jeopardy question, was somewhat appropriate.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20032547-52.html#ixzz1EGA00DPe
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