IBM has been developing a computer (named Watson - after IBM’s founder) that could compete on Jeopardy for a few years now. Tonight is when it gets it’s chance to compete on the show.
I watched a program on it the other day and what I realized is that they’re essentially refining search technology. Everyone is saying Google needs a proper competitor. What I realized is that Watson would be an incredible competitor to Goole search. It knows how to take context into account and to give you what you’re looking for rather than what you asked for. Things like synonyms are no big deal for Watson.
The question is whether IBM will license the technology or build their own search engine. If they launch a search engine I think they’d obliterate Bing and be a serious challenger for Google. They’ve got name recognition and stature. And they’re big enough Google can’t just buy the company to eliminate competition.
Well, Watson would be incredible at defense/intelligence analysis as well. In watching the program about Watson he represents a shift in thinking about intelligent systems. Instead of coding the cases in, they let the computer learn. So if you want the computer to recognize that a character is the letter A you give it a million examples of the letter A and let it figure out what makes an A an A. It can consider context, etc. Defense intelligence has to come up with reasonable answers from petabytes of data. Finding the correct needle in a haystack is exactly what Watson is good at. It’s also what people want when they do a query in Google…
That would be very entrepreneurial and uncharacteristically aggressive for button-downed IBM. But, who knows. Remember what they ended up doing with OS/2, Microsoft NT server’s competitor?
Sorted of watched the Jeopardy thing. Pretty impressive performance. However what impressed me more was all the PR IBM got out of this. On Sunday night I did not even know Watson existed - and I am a news junky.
The Power 7 processor that Watson uses was designed here in Austin at IBM’s research facility - so its been prominent in the news here for awhile. Still, I’m not sure IBM has the entrepreneurship, risk taking stance to really make something long term out of this. Still…who knows…it would be nice to see Google get some competition.
Watched Jeopardy lastnight and it was kind of scary. granted it missed a few, but still the thing was scary good. what surprised me though was the category about computer stuff it didn’t answer any of the questions in it. the thing just dominated and it was also scary how it seemed to know just where all the daily doubles were. Ken Jennings put up a good effort though, and his final jeopardy answer was good (I for one welcome our new computer overlords) but the thing just totally dominated the other guy.