A computer named Watson is the latest contestant in machine versus human battles of the "mind."
Next week the IBM supercomputer known as "Watson" will take on two of the most accomplished Jeopardy players of all time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a three-game match starting on February 14.
A computer taking on the best human contestants on Jeopardy!?—the prospect is perhaps even more astonishing than when IBM's Deep Blue computer challenged the world's top chess player in 1997 (and won). NOVA recently asked three experts on artificial intelligence about Watson, its capabilities, and its implications beyond the game show. They include David Ferrucci, head of the IBM team that programmed Watson to play on Jeopardy!; Rodney Brooks, roboticist and recently retired head of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT; and Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon and an inventor of CAPTCHA, the squiggly words and numbers used in computing to ensure a response is not coming from a computer. The following is an edited version of that conversation.
Click the link above and read the whole interview with NOVA.
So we don't have to worry about HAL from 2001...
Von Ahn: We don't have to worry about HAL just yet. Maybe in a hundred years or so. But that's okay; we'll be dead. [laughter]
One last question for Dave: What's the silliest answer you ever heard from Watson?
Ferrucci: Well, as Watson's developed over the years, it's had a lot of silly answers; there's quite a variety of them. I guess one of my favorites is we asked it "What do grasshoppers eat?" and its answer was "kosher." [laughter]
