This afternoon, the challenge between IBM’s Watson supercomputer and Jeopardy! legends Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter wraps up, and based on the results so far, it appears we should begin accepting that Watson will soon be our new king/lord. Still, the process is sort of amusing, if only for Jennings looks of annoyance and general irritation that a box of wires is destroying him at the only thing he’s famous for.
However, Greg Wyshynski, a hockey blogger for Yahoo, offered an interesting, yet highly unlikely twist:
Again, not likely, but I would like to see the look on the smug bastard Trebek’s face.
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2011.
“Jeopardy!” is usually fodder for nerds, and is known as the “thinking person’s game.” Now, IBM’s Watson computer is turning the game into a “thinking computer’s game.” The IBM-built supercomputer is thus far holding his-own in the brain game. Watson’s natural-language search capabilities are already going to be put to use in other places — possibly medical search. The millions used to make Watson no doubt took a considerable personal bank loan.