IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Wins Jeopardy Practice Round

In February IBM’s Watson Supercomputer will take on Jeopardy heavyweight champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter during several rounds of the popular game show and this week the first test round has proven that Watson is no contender to scoff at.

You may recall that IBM’s “Deep Blue” supercomputer took on chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of the first tests to show the analytical skills of IBM’s machines. Just like the Kasparov competition, Watson will be forced to analyze answers in real time, choose to buzz in based on the analytical skills of it’s system and then answer the question.

During an early test round not a single question was answered incorrectly with Watson answering in a computer voice, while using color codes to show it’s certainty of the answer being given.

The match wasn’t a total loss for Ken and Brad. Jennings ended with $3,400, while Rutter finished with $1,200. Watson ended the test trial with $4,400.

The test trial was missing Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy and Watson does require approximately three seconds to make a decision which means Ken and Brad do have time to buzz in quickly and hope for the best.

One cool part of the Watson program, he shows his most likely three answers and then rates them as he answers, allowing audience members to see how Watson operates in real-time.

According to Engadget, this is how Watson comes up with answers:

While Watson’s ability to understand questions, buzz in, and give a correct answer might seem very human-like, the actual tech behind Watson (dubbed “DeepQA” by IBM) is very computer-ey. Watson has thousands of algorithms it runs on the questions it gets, both for comprehension and for answer formulation. The thing is, instead of running these sequentially and passing along results, Watson runs them all simultaneously and compares all the myriad results at the end, matching up a potential meaning for the question with a potential answer to the question. The algorithms are backed up by vast databases, though there’s no active connection to the internet — that seems like it would be cheating, in Jeopardy terms.

In other news, we’re one step closer to complete computer domination.