IBM’s Watson is a computer designed to answer open-ended questions by understanding context and language. It was tested on the TV show Jeopardy! and defeated two champions. IBM hopes to use Watson in fields such as medicine and law.
Born in the headquarters of one of the world’s largest technology companies, IBM’s Watson is a computer built to tackle the pernicious problem of answering open-ended questions. While computers are excellent at performing lightning-fast searches based on keywords, computer developers have long been frustrated with artificial intelligence’s inability to properly understand context recognition and the complex relationships involved in human communication and language. Watson was specifically designed to try and defeat this long-standing problem in a unique way: the developers were able to test its capabilities by playing it on the popular American TV show, Jeopardy! ®.
IBM has a long history of presenting its employees and developers with “Grand Challenges” or activities intended to push the boundaries of technology. An earlier Grand Challenge computer, Deep Blue, shocked the world in the 1990s with its ability to beat chess grandmasters at their own game. The project that led to Watson is often cited as a sequel to Deep Blue, although the challenge of creating a computer that could mimic natural language associations was considered a much more difficult task.
Watson’s first work began in 2005, inspired in part by Jeopardy!® champion Ken Jennings’ historic 74-game winning streak. AI was initially considered by many to be too difficult to perfect, with early versions of the system taking minutes to complete questions that competent human players could answer in seconds. In addition to developing the computer to be able to recognize the context and inference conditions of a question, the IBM team also had to create Watson to be lightning fast.
In 2008, IBM began talking to Jeopardy!® executives about a competition between the computer and two previous Jeopardy!® champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In 2011, the computer successfully defeated both champions in a two-game series. While the computer dominated all three games, glitches in the programming caused some comedic moments. One major problem was that Watson could not hear or understand other players’ wrong answers, thus occasionally giving the same wrong answer directly after a human contestant. Some critics also suggest that Watson has an unfair advantage, since he is able to press the response buzzer faster than humans could muster the urge to speak.
IBM officials have expressed hope that Watson’s Jeopardy!® performance is just the first step in a revolutionary form of natural language programming. Following the success of the Jeopardy!® Challenge, Watson is undergoing further research and programming to extend his capabilities. The medical and legal fields have both been suggested by IBM team members as new frontiers for the development of Watson.
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