IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy
Last night marked the beginning of the IBM Jeopardy challenge. For those of you who don’t know, IBM has been working for some time on a system (named Watson) that has overcome some amazing challenges. The goal: to build an entirely self-contained system that can beat the World’s best Jeopardy players.
Now, I’m not going to give you a rundown on it as I’m sure that you can (or have already) read it on a website far more popular than mine. I just wanted to publicly geek out for a second…
I was watching the episode of Jeopardy with my wife, and at first glance she was like “duh, of course a computer could win at Jeopardy”. This made me realize that to a non engineer, this seems like a trivial task since computers are magical Facebook boxes.
Now me on the other hand, I was giddy to the point of almost wetting myself. Seeing how far we have come in AI development and language processing is absolutely incredible.
I for one, will be glued to my tv tonight to watch Watson’s next round of Jeopardy.
