And no, we don't mean to say that Big Blue is in trouble the company is going to create a system that will compete with humans on the popular TV show
And no, we don't mean to say that Big Blue is in trouble the company is going to create a system that will compete with humans on the popular TV show Hope you win: Dave Ferrucci, IBM scientist and Watson project director, with the machine that IBM wants to feature on the show Jeopardy Pic/IBM
How clever can you get? This is a question that computer scientists like to contemplate into the wee hours of the morning. But getting the definition of clever is tricky. Once upon a time, a clever computer was one that could play chess and beat a human preferably a world champion. This record was created when Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by IBM, defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997.
Then what?
Ok, so you have beaten somebody in chess by computing a million moves a second (Deep Blue actually did 200 million positions per second, but let's leave that aside for the moment), so people will naturally ask, what is the next big thing?
The answer is out after all these years. IBM is developing a system code-named Watson (let's hope it's smarter than Sherlock's Boswell) that will soon take part in the TV show.
Making the move
Playing chess with Kasparov where some technician from IBM is feeding information to Deep Blue about the grand master's moves is a lot different from featuring with real humans, in real time, on a show.
For, here, IBM's computer will not get any help from anybody it will have to handle everything on its own. While full details of when or how Watson will make an appearance are not very clear, IBM says that Watson will not be connected to the Internet when it is used. It will also stand on its own two feet (four legs if you want to be accurate).
What it means
At one level, it is great PR for IBM if our computers can feature on a popular show, then they are good enough for your business but there is a deeper meaning to this.
From a scientific point of view, it brings us closer to a machine that can pass the Turing test. Such a system could also one day answer your queries automatically on the phone (there goes the BPO industry).
QUICK TAKE
>>IBM is working on a system that will feature on TV
>>It will compete with humans without any assistance from the Internet
>>This system brings us close to something that can pass the Turing test
What's the Turing test?
The Turing test was described by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. It is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. It proceeds as follows:
>>A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one person and one machine. All three are placed in isolated locations
>>Both participants communicate with the judge over a text based system
>>If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the Turing test
Source: Wikipedia
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