Friday, June 18, 2010

AI for Jeopardy: IBM's Watson

In case you haven't heard, IBM is creating a supercomputer to play Jeopardy. The idea is to build AI that can answer factual questions in regular, spoken English. The system, named "Watson" after two longtime IBM presidents, has been in development for a couple years now, and is starting to beat strong-ish human competitors. It's slated to play against past Jeopardy grandmasters sometime this fall.

Here's a short promotional video by IBM.

Here's an extended article discussing the challenge and the technology in NYTimes.

Related: from xkcd.

No comments: