Watson: Countdown to Jeopardy!

[GH0ST]

"Watson", IBM's latest super computer, is designed to understand the meaning and context of human language and rapidly give precise answers to complex questions, against the game's greatest!

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IBM’s pure language processing computer, Watson, faced the titans of Jeopardy: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson won.

It was a brief sparring session in January, and the real challenge is airing now over three days from 14-16 February.

The TV show is an important test for Big Blue's work in the field of artificial intelligence.

"The big challenge we see here is helping people really appreciate the power and limits of the technology we are developing with Watson," Dr David Ferrucci, IBM's chief scientist of Watson computing told BBC News

Watson draws its information from a personal database, not the internet. It can answer most Jeopardy questions in about three seconds. To do so, Watson uses massive amounts of parallel computing power. Inside the large machine are racks of servers, over 2000 cores, with 15 terabytes of RAM, and about 80 teraflops of processing power. Yet all of this hardware is more or less “off the shelf”. What makes Watson really unique is the way it processes language. IBM developed the DeepQA project (of which Watson is a part) to be able to provide human-like answers to human-asked questions. That means it has to understand the ambiguities and intricacies of human speech – a medium of communication notorious for its acceptable mistakes and imprecision. Using its vast database of literature, scientific reports, and other documents, Watson develops ideas of how often words are associated with other words, and what meanings are extracted from those connections. Add in a few rules about how to best play Jeopardy, and you are most of the way towards building a computer that can defeat humans at their own game.

Beyond Jeopardy!, the IBM team is working to deploy this technology across industries such as healthcare, finance and customer service.

Video and details at Singularity Hub: Watch the Watson Computer Kick Jeopardy’s Ass
IBM Center: Watson Innovation

 

[Bladexdsl]

way to go IBM your going to be the cause of the death of us all!

SKYNET!

 

[VashTS]

at least we know what we have to go back in time to destroy.

 

[Raven Darkheart]

the beginning of skynet?

 

[GH0ST]

"We are going not just for a homerun, but for a homerun with the bases loaded." (Dr Modha)

 

[Deleted_171835]

I was watching the game.
Watson is quite good. I do wonder where Watson gets his 'information'. Is it stored in the servers? It does seem a bit unfair, though. Surely IBM can't have all the information known to man on a those servers. What if Watson is asked a question that's not in his database? Unless it accesses the information from an encyclopedia such as Encyclopedia Britannica.

 

[Zerousen]

I was watching the game.
Watson is quite good. I do wonder where Watson gets his 'information'. Is it stored in the servers? It does seem a bit unfair, though. Surely IBM can't have all the information known to man on a those servers. What if Watson is asked a question that's not in his database? Unless it accesses the information from an encyclopedia such as Encyclopedia Britannica.

That's what I was wondering, where DOES he get his information?
Anyways, I'd laugh if Watson were to ever go on a losing streak.

 

[Lacius]

Weird, I was watching NOVA scienceNOW a couple of days ago, and they were talking about Watson. On the show, they said it wasn't ready to play Jeopardy on TV because they didn't want to risk embarrassing themselves. I'm glad they finally felt ready.

 

[GH0ST]

I was watching the game.
Watson is quite good. I do wonder where Watson gets his 'information'. Is it stored in the servers? It does seem a bit unfair, though. Surely IBM can't have all the information known to man on a those servers. What if Watson is asked a question that's not in his database? Unless it accesses the information from an encyclopedia such as Encyclopedia Britannica.

Technically speaking, Watson wasn’t in the room. It was one floor up and consisted of a roomful of servers working at "light speed".

Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per coreOver its three-year life.

Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference material that it could use to build its knowledge, such as bibles, novels and plays. Rather than relying on a single algorithm, Watson uses thousands of algorithms simultaneously to understand the question being asked and find the correct path to the answer which it now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not connected to the Internet, it knows only what is already in its “brain.”)

David Ferrucci (Research Staff Member and leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center): I think what's making Watson successful is its internal architecture. It's looking at so many different algorithms—thousands of different algorithms—some of them focused on understanding the question, weighting the various terms, looking at the grammar, the syntax, finding the phrases, the keywords, the entities, the dates, the times, trying to understand what it is being asked. And this, in itself, is a big challenge, where we use a variety of different technologies. But ultimately, what's exciting about it is how it looks at many, many different possibilities and assesses them and builds confidence in a final answer to decide whether or not it's correct and whether or not it wants to risk buzzing in on Jeopardy!

Originally Watson buzzed in electronically, but even with a robotic "finger" pressing the buzzer, Watson remained faster than its human competitors. Jennings noted, "If you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all," and that Watson "can knock out a microsecond-precise buzz every single time with little or no variation. Human reflexes can't compete with computer circuits in this regard." Also, Watson could avoid the time-penalty for accidentally buzzing in too early, because it was electronically notified when to buzz, whereas the human contestants had to anticipate the right moment.

But Watson is "deaf": in one notable instance, Watson repeated a reworded version of an incorrect answer. Because it doesn't utilize speech recognition, it had no knowledge that another one had already given the same answer.

In another incident, Watson was initially given credit for an answer of "What is leg?" ( rather than "What is missing a leg?") after Jennings incorrectly answered "What is a missing hand?" to a question about George Eyser. Because Watson, unlike a human, could not have been responding following the context of the first answer. it was decided that this answer was incorrect. (The broadcast version of the episode was edited to omit original acceptance of the answer).

QUOTE

A SELF-CONFIDENT COMPUTER
Playing successfully on Jeopardy! often involves ego and the confidence to gamble. Did you program self-confidence into Watson? How close are computers to breaking that barrier of human-like emotions?

Ferrucci: That's a great question. It's a fascinating one really. And one of the big challenges—and this is where we exploited machine learning in a big way—was computing that confidence and figuring out how to use that confidence to manage risk during a game.

So, for example, sometimes the computer is really sure it knows the answer and wants to be very aggressive with the buzzer. Other times it's not so sure, and it actually weighs how good its competitors are. Other times it feels its way ahead and doesn't want to take a risk, so it needs to be a lot more confident to buzz in. Sometimes it's desperate and actually wants to take a risk, even if it's not as sure. All that's in there, believe it or not. And you want to call those emotions. They're really not emotions. They're complex mathematical equations that we've trained into Watson over many, many simulations. It makes it a very fascinating challenge.

The other thing I'll mention about emotions, though, is Watson doesn't sweat! I sweat, but Watson doesn't. So we've seen games where Watson lost a big daily double and went down to zero and just kept right on going. Personally I would have fainted. :-)

Sources:
Will Watson Win on Jeopardy!? ( Nova beta )
What Is I.B.M.’s Watson? (NYT)
Wikipedia : Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)