The Saugeen Times

IBM Watson Research Labs has always been near the top of innovation over the past 60 years. Named after IBM's President Thomas Watson, it has cooperated with other industrial research organizations like Bell Labs and General Motors Research, often working with them on big projects.

The first I became associated with them was with DAC or Design Automated by Computer the joint effort that included GM, IBM and MIT. It was a grand effort and new technology developed out of it including the first industrial use of Computer Aided Design and interactive displays along with the first operating system.

Later IBM took on the task of playing Chess using Deep Blue, their supercomputer. Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. On May 11, 1997, the machine won a six-game match by two wins to one with three draws against world champion Garry Kasparov

These efforts and others over time have made IBM one of the world's leaders in supercomputing, where massive arrays of computers, some built to do a certain task, have been brought into complex problem solving.

The latest is Watson which has been designed to untangle the mystery of how humans deal with natural language. This is not a Google search or a computer that records what you say and tries to mimic it. Watson wants to think better than you do. The famous IBM sign that adorns walls throughout the company is THINK and Watson seems to be on the verge of doing just that in the area of answering questions.

If you type in questions in Google, you get back, sometimes, millions of suggestions ordered with the likeliest first, but beyond that, it is up to you to find what you need. Watson on the other hand has been designed to compete with the grand champions of Jeopardy, which is a test that has been dreamed about for years.

Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How on earth he got in my pajamas, I could not guess.

IBM got a number of noted researchers together to tackle the Jeopardy problem and they are now ready to challenge two former Grand Champions. The first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy competition will air on February 14, 15 and 16, 2011, with two matches being played over three consecutive days.

The project started in earnest in 2007 and has moved very quickly. What the secrets of Watson's ability, it no clear, but it appears that a variety of algorithms have been 'thrown' into Watson to tackle the problems in a number of ways in a parallel manner.

Remember, Jeopardy is a complicated game. It poses a question from different categories and varying difficulty and the contestants have to press a buzzer, if they think they know the answer.

But, what if they are not sure? Sometimes they hold back and let another contestant make a guess because if they are the first to press their buzzer, they will lose money with an invalid answer. So you can see that there is strategy and timing in the game too.

Watson has gone through a number of test rounds inside IBM. At first it was terrible, giving answers that made no sense and had the researchers in stitches, but over time, it got better and now the real test.

How will it do against real-life champions? No matter, if it does not win. The mere fact that IBM thinks Watson can compete makes us believe that they think Watson will make them proud. We are very close to the legendary Turing Test

The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen

The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950's Turing was the famous mathematician so involved in cryptography with the Enigma Machine in World War II