IBM's Jeopardy Strategy 99
jfruhlinger writes "Developing a computer that could play chess once seemed like a worthy AI goal — but it turned out to be something of a dead end, as chess is very abstract and simple when compared to the real world. Will creating a game-show-playing computer lead to more interesting results? IBM hopes so, and its Watson machine will tackle problems in parallel processing, data searching, and natural language comprehension in an attempt to beat Jeopardy legends Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. " IBM announced the man vs. machine competition last month.
Re:What is the value in this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is the value in this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Human Language Processing is still a weak point in getting computers to do what film computers do.
If you can get a computer to understand what you mean, then it'd change UIs forever.
Re:Once, IBM took on the mighty game of chess... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually useful (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What is the value in this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can get a computer to understand what you mean, then it'd change UIs forever.
Per the article, a single processor would take 3 hours to process each Jeopardy answer. That would certainly qualify as "forever" in the context of a user interface.
And since computers don't go faster, it'll be like that forever.
Re:Once, IBM took on the mighty game of chess... (Score:4, Insightful)
The help desk is a lot like Jeopardy too, in that the answer is often given in the form of a question. e.g. "Is the computer plugged in?"