The machine won.
An IBM computer named Watson handily defeated two former Jeopardy! champions Wednesday, stamping out a definite period at the end of the sentence: “Take that, humanity.”
The final episode in the three-day competition hasn’t aired in Seattle yet, but I’ll go ahead and ruin the fun by saying how it turns out.
Contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter compete against 'Watson' at a press conference to discuss the upcoming Man V. Machine 'Jeopardy!' competition at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center on January 13, 2011 in Yorktown Heights, New York. (Photo by Ben Hider/Getty Images)
Seattle-based Ken Jennings: $24,000.
Former champion Brad Rutter: $21,600.
Watson, a giant supercomputer designed to think like a human but react like a machine: $77,147.
Ouch. Thanks a lot, Watson.
When I talked with Jennings and Rutter late last week, they both seemed upbeat about the Jeopardy! experience.
But now, one comment made by Jennings makes a little more sense.
“I sort of felt like a Detroit auto worker watching the robot replace him on the assembly line,” he said.
Now that the machine’s game-show dominance has been clearly asserted, the speculation begins. What does it mean? What’s next? And — oh, the horror — what if machines start beating us on all our favorite TV competitions?
Here are a few of the questions and ideas being posed in the wake of Watson’s Jeopardy! upset.
Watson plays ‘Jeopardy!’ well, but what else can it do? (USA Today)
How much did the “buzzer factor” help Watson? (New York Times)
An analysis of “mighty Watson, master of Jeopardy!” (All Things Digital)
Visit seattlepi.com’s home page for more Seattle news. Contact Amy Rolph at amyrolph@seattlepi.com or on Twitter as @amyrolph and @bigblog.
Loll This was a nice speech.
Hopefully will find more practical uses for super-computer Watson, like Cancer, AIDs research, and other well known health issues, and/or maybe other challenges, like the defecit. And hopefully it learns from its mistakes (it was not perfect on the show, but pretty close).
Does anyone know if Watson had help from the internet/search/crawler?
Until I have to punch “Watson” for giving my girl the eye, I don’t think I”ll fear A.I…. yet.
Did they handicap the computer with a delay equivalent to the average human physiological response to push the button? Otherwise the experiment is BS.
Wow! Thanks PI. It’s 7:05 PM Wednesday evening and I was looking forward to watching that at 7:30 tonight. Guess I don’t need to now. Good going!