IBM supercomputer puts human supremacy in Jeopardy

There aren't many quiz shows where the stakes are high for anyone but the participants but in the special episodes of Jeopardy! on American television this week, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money are very much an afterthought.

The real prize: humanity's continued supremacy in the ongoing struggle to preserve our status against computers. And it doesn't seem to be going very well.

For the human race it might be the moment to concede that even when it comes to the kind of questions that seem to require an intuitive sense of meaning, computers have us licked.

Probably the only people truly delighted by the result will be staff at IBM, which made Watson.

For three nights this week the little box - not so little because it is backed up off stage by large servers with 15 terabytes (about 15,000GB) of RAM - has been the star guest in sitting rooms all over America.

It is a clash of silicon versus synapses of a kind not since the same company's Deep Blue took on Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997.

Deep Blue won 14 years ago (although Kasparov had won against an earlier version of the machine) and Watson has not disappointed on Jeopardy!, a show that has been a staple on America's primetime schedules for 47 years.

For the occasion the producers brought in the two most successful human contestants ever, Ken Jennings, who had the longest winning streak on the show at 74, and Brad Rutter, who has won the most money from it - $3.2m.

With a format that requires general knowledge on every imaginable topic with an answer in the form of a question (say, Q. Mount Everest A. What is the highest mountain in the world?), Jeopardy! would seem to present a particular challenge to a computer.

A wide range of factual knowledge is abetted often by what one might call educated guesses. The very human facets of hunch and instinct are in order.

It took a team of 25 computer scientists at IBM four years to come up with Watson. While the television show is mostly about entertainment, the high ratings for Jeopardy! this week also point to our long-held fascination with the notion that machines one day might be vested with artificial intelligence and begin to expand the kinds of tasks they can do.

Still, the computer has not had it all its own way. On Tuesday night, US time, Watson bungled what some saw as a relatively easy question asking which "US city" has its largest airport "named for a Second World War hero; its second largest, for a Second World War battle"? The monotone voice of Watson should have asked "What is Chicago?" but instead said "What is Toronto?" The question said US so why did he come up with a Canadian one? But Watson did win the first round overall.

"Humanity, do not despair just yet!" cried Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy!, talking about the mistake. "Some people at IBM are taking this so seriously. They're about to release excuses. They should say, 'Watson made a mistake."'

In another facet the two human champions can grab a question by interrupting intuitively and buzzing to take the question whereas Watson will only buzz when it has an answer: speed versus certitude.

Mr Trebek says: "It can never ring in too early and lock itself out. Last night and the night before the guys locked themselves out nine times by trying to anticipate."

- THE INDEPENDENT