Artificial intelligence may be a fact of life for modern consumers, operating behind the scenes in a myriad of ways, but the public awareness of it is rather minimal. Predictive algorithms, after all, rarely make the headlines. That all changed this week as IBM entered a new question-answering machine called Watson as a contestant on the Jeopardy game show. As the LA Times reports:
The machine has won. Watson defeated the two biggest "Jeopardy" winners of all time: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The IBM computer finished the final round of competition on Wednesday night with $77,147 in winnings over Jennings' $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600. Jennings holds the record for number of consecutive Jeopardy matches won, with 74. Rutter has won more money than anyone else on Jeopardy. The two men competed against each other in a 2005 tournament that resulted in a Rutter victory. Since Watson won, IBM is awarded $1 million -- all of it going to charities World Vision (an anti-poverty group) and World Community Grid (which builds computer grids to address social issues such as water shortages). Jennings, who won a $300,000 prize for second place, and Rutter, who was awarded $200,000, will each donate half their winnings to charities of their choosing. The three-episode showdown, which began Monday, was filled with minutes of featurettes in which IBM engineers spoke about how they built Watson and how its question-answering technology could be tailored to its enterprise clients such as hospitals, transportation departments, help desks and law firms. Academics have applauded IBM as having created a potentially breakthrough system to analyze unstructured data. And some readers, who left their comments on previous Technology Blog posts this week, complained about the three-day run, calling it essentially an infomercial for IBM.
No word yet on which "enterprise clients" will next make use of Watson, but there's no doubt that variations or descendants of Watson will soon find a place in business, academia and military circles:
Photo Credit: The Los Angeles Times
Comments