The Coming A.I. Revolution

**why06** · 02-08-2011

What is Watson?

In one week the world will change forever.

Man vs. Machine is the name of the game and in 6 days the most incredible contests since Deep Blue beat the chess grand master Kasparov is about to take place on National Television. The super computer developed by IBM "WATSON" is preparing to take on the Jeopardy grand champion Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. I don't know about you, but I don't just find jeopardy hard, I suck at it, but you have to be really good at remembering facts to compete on it. WATSON will answer these complex tricky question at the same time as the Contestants. The technical implications of this will be invaluable, but the more important thing and the reason we are all watching is the social implication. Imagine a computer that can give you any answer as long as it's written in a book somewhere, even if it doesn't understand it, and you can just begin to see how this will change everything. The A.I. Winter is finally over welcome to the Re-Birth of A.I., and just in time for 2012, while were at it.

Showtimes: Jeopardy 7:30PM EST, Febuary 14, 15, & 16

Originally Posted by IBM

The DeepQA Project

A computer system that can directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge has been envisioned by scientists and writers since the advent of computers themselves. Consider, for example, the "Computer" in Star Trek. Taken to its ultimate form, broad and accurate open-domain question answering may well represent a crowning achievement for the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

While current computers can store and deliver a wealth of digital content created by humans, they are unable to operate over it in human terms. The quest for building a computer system that can do open-domain Question Answering is ultimately driven by a broader vision that sees computers operating more effectively in human terms rather than strictly computer terms. They should function in ways that understand complex information requirements, as people would express them, for example, in natural language questions or interactive dialogs. Computers should deliver precise, meaningful responses, and synthesize, integrate, and rapidly reason over the breadth of human knowledge as it is most rapidly and naturally produced -- in natural language text.

The possibilities for enriching our global community and accelerating the pace at which we can exploit and expand human knowledge, solve problems and help each other in ways never before imagined, rests on our ability to bring information technology out of the era of operating in computer terms and into the era of operating in human terms.

The DeepQA project at IBM shapes a grand challenge in Computer Science that aims to illustrate how the wide and growing accessibility of natural language content and the integration and advancement of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and massively parallel computation can drive open-domain automatic Question Answering technology to a point where it clearly and consistently rivals the best human performance.

A first stop along the way is the Jeopardy! Challenge...

Smartest Machine On Earth
There will be a NOVA Program on this great even tommorrow, Wednesday 10 P.M., Febuary 9th. Check it out if you can. "Smartest Machine on Earth" Will give you a behind the scenes look at the practice rounds and development of WATSON before the big day... well days, Febuary 14, 15, & 16 on Jeopardy.

Yes I have been gearing up for this post all day. Excuse me for geeking out a little bit, I can do that on the internet.