HPCwire: Alex, I'll Take Supercomputing for $1000

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April 29, 2009

Alex, I'll Take Supercomputing for $1000

It seems fitting that in the age of reality shows and celebrity adoration, a scientific demonstration of artificial intelligence will take place on a television quiz program. On Monday, IBM announced that it will be pitting its latest and greatest Blue Gene/P supercomputing technology against human contestants on the popular game show, Jeopardy.

According to the company, IBM scientists have developed a system called "Watson" that "will be able to understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on Jeopardy!" Call it the Trivial Pursuit version of the Turing test. Of course, IBM's goal here is not to go on the game show circuit. The technology behind Watson has general applicability to commercial businesses and governments that are looking to augment human intelligence.

This is all in the research stage, so IBM is not ready to release these systems into the wild just yet. The company didn't talk much about the nature of the software it's developing, except to say that it contains a natural language processing technology. In many ways, Watson looks like IBM's version of Wolfram Alpha, a Web-based computational knowledge engine that is set to debut next month (and which I previewed in March). In both cases, the challenge is to interpret the questions correctly in real time -- the part that's relatively easy for mere mortals.

Here's IBM describing its new technology:

IBM loves this kind of techno-theater. In 1997, an IBM super called Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match (two wins to one with three draws). That system was one of the most powerful computers of its day, delivering 11.38 gigaflops of Linpack, which earned it the 259th spot on the TOP500 list in June of 1997. That same computing horsepower is now available in a just a single core of a high-end x86 processor.

Ironically, Deep Blue's 1997 achievement contributed to the demise of chess as a spectator sport, which it achieved in the last quarter of the 20th century with characters like Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky and Kasparov bringing American-Soviet drama into this highly cerebral game. But the fact that a machine could now beat the world champs relegated chess to just a mathematical exercise.

If Watson manages to beat the humans at Jeopardy, it will be interesting to see how it changes our attitudes about big money game shows, not to mention our ultimate trivial pursuit: our rote learning style of education. Now that would be progress.

Posted by Michael Feldman - April 29 @ 8:14AM

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Discussion

There are 1 discussion items posted.

Harder than chess
Submitted by addisonsnell on 04/28/2009 - 11:49PM

I play Star Wars trivial pursuit with my young kids. They know all the movies backwards and forward, so they've got the answers. However, they have trouble understanding the questions. ("What trivial board game frequently obfuscates otherwise straightforward questions with vocabulary and puns that have the potential to drive a wedge between knowledge and a correct answer?")

Chess is a tough game, sure, but it is also algorithmic. One could conceive of a computer building a matrix of all possible moves, reducing the game to a tic-tac-toe-esque flowchart of prescribed moves.

Not so with trivia. Trivia by definition could be just about any bit of knowledge, and new trivia is created all the time. ("What is the code name of the IBM supercomputer slated to compete on Jeopardy?") And even if the answer is in the data banks somewhere, Watson will have to interpret the question correctly in order to retrieve it, potentially according to an odd category. Nightmarish categories for a computer could include "Colorful Geography" (Yellow River, White Plains, etc.) or "'CUE' the Band," in which all answers start with that phoneme (cuneiform, Qbert, etc.).

White Plains might be close to Watson's home town, but will it be recognized as a colorful place? And I'm CU-rious to see if Watson knows how trivial knowledge is pronounced.

Then again, how many times, after hearing an answer, have you slapped your head and shouted "I knew that!" Why didn't you answer? Maybe Watson knows.

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Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

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