Watson, IBM’s latest silicon creation has been tasked with taking on humans in a slightly different setting than it’s used to. Playing chess against grandmasters is all in a days work for the computer that would be human (or is that destroy them?) but IBM’s next goal is to go head to head against human contestants in an attempt to “..get Watson to think and interact in human terms,” IBM’s Dr David Ferrucci is quoted as saying.

“It will try to understand a user’s question and intent and understand it at a rudimentary level and provide and accurate and confident answer.”

Of course buzzing in with a wrong answer in Jeopardy is costly and so Watson must be absolutely sure before answering. This kind of open ended question answering is something that hasn’t been tackled successfully in the past. Playing chess means calculating millions of chess moves to find the best solution to a fixed problem. Answering questions on a game show like Jeopary requires a very different skill set, something computers are not naturally good at requiring broad general knowledge, quick prompt analysis of meaning, irony, riddles and other natural language subtleties that are at a pinch out of the remit of a computer. Matching words to words is something a computer excels at but matching meaning to meaning is still something that although we take it for granted in our own lives, computationally is exceptionally hard.

Hit the read link for more on what could become your computer overlords in the near future.

Watson will be given the questions as electronic text while the human contestants will both see the text and hear it spoken by the show’s host Alex Trebek. Watson will also be disconnected from the internet allowing only the use of previously parsed information stored in it’s memory. Watson will answer the questions in a synthesised voice and be able to choose follow-up questions. IBM and the show’s producers aim to involve Ken Jennings, the legendary grand master of Jeopardy with 74 consecutive wins and collected a prise fund of $2.52m in 2004.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e22ufcqfTs[/youtube]

IBM does have a constructive business plan behind this high-profile stunt. The aim is to provide accurate and fast answers by having the computer look at all the information associated with a search regardless of how remote that might impinge on an answer that you might be building towards. Traditional search returns lots of information, but unless you have an infinite amount of time to search through every resource for even the smallest pieces of information you’re at risk of missing something and creating an ill informed decision. Dr. Ferrucci aims to have Watson “…able to be applied to all sorts of applications in the world and essentially cut the time to find answers to very difficult problems… [by]…getting the computer to work in human terms”.

Once Watson has taken on and beaten Ken Jennings (it’s not a case of if but when one supposes) what’s next for the mightly computing machine? Building better humans? Understanding the meaning of emotions and finding the hatred that drives the human race? How about taking on humans in the ultimate battle, Quake Live? Yeah ok, the computer already kicks my ass at that one too.

What would you, our dear readers, have Watson do for you? The answer is 42 remember.

[Via BBC]