Ken Jennings Welcomes Our New Overlords
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably already know that Jeopardy! super-champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter were defeated by IBM’s new supercomputer, Watson. It’s been 14 years since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov and Watson represents a tremendous leap forward in natural language understanding.
Over at Slate, Jenning’s has offered a wonderful look at what it was like to compete against the new machine:
Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it’s confident about an answer.
