admin on February 10th, 2011
KNOWING EARLIER with Watson:
On February 9, NOVA previewed the Jeopardy game show match between the two most successful players in the long history of that show and an IBM computer system named Watson (the name of IBM’s founder, the name of IBM’s research facility where the system was developed over the past 5 years, Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick, and the person called by Alexander Graham Bell in the first phone call, “Mr Watson—Come here—I want…you.”)
However well Watson does in this match-up, the consensus of artificial intelligence experts is that it represents a breakthrough in dealing with the ambiguities of human speech – including puns, homophones, double meanings, slang and complex syntax. Watson can interpret a question (in the case of the Jeopardy game, the question is posed as a partial answer), using “machine learning” techniques (essentially multiple layers of adaptive pattern recognition). It applies massive computing power to: 1) sort through the results of its real time search of an equally massive database of documents, 2) select, and 3) deliver an answer. It does all this within the average of 2-3 seconds it takes a human contestant to respond.
Imagine that the Jeopardy host Alex Trebek is a physician making a difficult diagnosis with an ambiguous set of symptoms and test reports; an FBI analyst sorting through an ambiguous collection of conflicting field reports and reports from other analysts to deliver “actionable intelligence;” or a consumer trying to decide which mobile device to buy this week. If Watson were customized to support the Sense and Interpret phases of role-specific heads-up displays for the physician, analyst and consumer, they could reasonably expect orders of magnitude improvement in the speed and quality of the decisions they make.
Watson itself doesn’t “know” anything except how to execute its code. Nor does it make meaning about the implications of it outputs. But it is capable of producing good answers to unanticipated questions at lightning speed for knowers and meaning-makers.
The three Jeopardy matches with Watson will be televised on February 14-16.