The Difference Engine: The answering machine

The Economist

IT WAS not quite a foregone conclusion, but all the smart money was on the machine. Since the first rehearsal over a year ago, it had become apparent that Watson—a supercomputer built by IBM to decode tricky questions posed in English and answer them correctly within seconds—would trounce the smartest of human challengers. And so it did earlier this week, following a three-day contest against the two most successful human champions of all time on “Jeopardy!”, a popular quiz game aired on American television. By the end of the contest, Watson had accumulated over $77,000 in winnings, compared with $24,000 and $21,600 for the two human champions. IBM donated the $1m in special prize money to charity, while the two human contestants gave half their runner-up awards away.

IBM has a long tradition of setting “grand challenges” for itself—as a way of driving internal research and innovation as well as demonstrating its technical smarts to the outside world. A previous challenge was the chess match staged in 1997 between IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer and the then world champion, Garry Kasparov. As shocking as it seemed at the time, a computer capable of beating the best chess-player in the world proved only that the machine had enough computational horsepower to perform the rapid logical analysis needed to cope with the combinatorial explosion of moves and counter-moves. In no way did it demonstrate that Deep Blue was doing something even vaguely intelligent.

Even so, defeating a grandmaster at chess was child’s play compared with challenging a quiz show famous for offering clues laden with ambiguity, irony, wit and double meaning as well as riddles and puns—things that humans find tricky enough to fathom, let alone answer. Getting a mere number-crunchier to do so had long been thought impossible. The ability to parse the nested structure of language to extract context and meaning, and then use such concepts to create other linguistic structures, is what human intelligence is supposed to be all about.

(Original here.)