[Infowarrior] - Don't Read Unless You Want to Know If IBM Won `Jeopardy'

[Richard Forno]

Don't Read This Unless You Want to Know If IBM Won `Jeopardy'

By Katie Hoffmann - Feb 16, 2011 5:09 PM ET Wed Feb 16 22:09:41 GMT 2011

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-16/don-t-read-this-unless-you-want-to-know-if-ibm-won-jeopardy-.html

Machine bested man today, as International Business Machines Corp.’s computer beat two former “Jeopardy!” champions at the TV quiz show.

‘Watson,’ IBM’s computer named after its founder Thomas J. Watson, finished the three-day tournament with $77,147. Ken Jennings came in second with $24,000, followed by Brad Rutter with $21,600.

With a $25,000 lead going into the final match, Watson doubled his advantage by answering questions on subjects from “The Simpsons” to Bram Stoker accurately. The win gives IBM a highly publicized victory in artificial intelligence -- and a boost as it moves to market the technology to its corporate customers.

“It’s a big win for IBM,” said Paul Saffo, managing director at investment adviser Discern Analytics in San Francisco. “It’s captured the public’s attention. For their brand, this is phenomenal.”

“Jeopardy” airs at different times across the country, and today’s episode has already been broadcast in some cities. In New York, the show will air at 7 p.m.

IBM built Watson to tackle a challenge in artificial intelligence: making a machine that could understand natural human language, as opposed to the keyword searches used in the search engines of Google Inc. or Microsoft Corp. IBM wanted the effort to have real-world applications. “Jeopardy,” with its word plays, innuendos and penalties for inaccuracy, proved a good test.

Watson faced two of the best-known players in the show’s history. Jennings, who won 74 straight games in 2004, holds the record for the number of games won, while Rutter has won more money than any player on Jeopardy and beat Jennings in a tournament in 2005.

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Going into today’s final game, Watson led with $35,734, with Rutter at $10,400 and Jennings at $4,800. The first game was played over the first two days of the tournament, which was broadcast from IBM’s lab in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Watson, who appears on film as a round avatar on a screen, has a custom-made database created from journals, newspapers and other resources. The computer received questions through typed entries at the same time as host Alex Trebek read them out loud. It scanned the database with algorithms and calculated its degree of confidence in an answer. If its confidence crossed a certain threshold, a mechanical thumb buzzed in and Watson spoke the answer.

The computer made some gaffes. In the first round, it repeated an incorrect answer Jennings had given moments before. In yesterday’s Final Jeopardy, the last round of each game that often involves word play, Watson identified Toronto as a U.S. city. Its answer was followed by question marks, indicating how unsure it was of its answer.

IBM Pressure

IBM, which spends about $6 billion annually on research and development, invested four years developing the technology, with 25 scientists focused on the challenge. Trebek said he saw a researcher crying before the competition, which was taped last month.

“There’s tremendous pressure on the IBM scientists,” Trebek said in an interview last week. “The pressure they had put on themselves. They’re the ones who decided to try and develop a computer system that can play ‘Jeopardy.’”

The project built on IBM’s work in artificial intelligence, including the Deep Blue supercomputer that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a 1997 match. IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider, decided to try another challenge that would pique the public’s interest -- and this time with commercial applications.

Business Applications

The machine has generated interest from businesses in various sectors, especially customer support and health care, Dave Ferrucci, IBM’s lead scientist on the project, said in an interview last year. The computer runs on IBM’s Power 7 server system.

“The Holy Grail here is to create a technology that can understand what you’re asking, the way you’re asking it,” he said. “People want to do more with all the content we have.”

Watson won $1 million for first place. Jennings and Rutter won $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. IBM will donate all its winnings to charity, while Rutter and Jennings plan to give away half.

IBM rose 56 cents to $163.40 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have gained 11 percent this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Katie Hoffmann in New York at khoffmann4 at bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom at bloomberg.net.