I like Jeopardy! anyways, but this week has been especially intriguing. In two games aired over three days Ken Jennings, the 74-game winner, and Brad Rutter, the all-time money champ, go head to head with Watson.
Actually, that’s not true. Watson has no head. He’s a computer–a supercomputer three years in the making whose total cost to IBM may be as much as $1-$2 billion dollars. It’s one those Gary Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, man vs. machine stories that makes the news every few years.
The first game finished last night. Watson trounced the humans by more than $25,000. It wasn’t even close. Round One goes to the machine.
And yet, I’m still left scratching my head at the genius God gave to mankind. Let me explain.
Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter have roughly 3 pounds of gray matter (pink really), enough to fill the palm of your hand. Watson is too big to fit on stage. What you see on t.v. is a monitor, some sort of avatar. The real Watson is comprised of 90 IBM servers enclosed in ten racks. Score one for the humans for being more compact and mobile. Seriously, how is this a fair fight when Watson gets 90 brains working for him offstage?
And consider this: Watson has 16 terabytes of memory, equal to all the information in print at the Library of Congress. And Jennings and Rutter still knew some questions the computer didn’t. Sure, they got smoked (mostly by not ringing in first I surmise), but they didn’t have a million books within their immediate mental reach. I’m amazed they beat a supercomputer on any question whatsoever.
The difference is that humans do better at understanding the intricacies of human language, the puns, the double meanings, the hidden clues. Watson is an amazing machine to get most of these clues, but as one article pointed out, he excelled at the questions that you can find by searching on google. He did worse at those that required more sophistication.
Watson was marvelous at coming up with “cut and dried” answers: questions pertaining to song lyrics or historical facts. It seemed to falter though at those “nuanced” questions so prevalent in Jeopardy!, the ones where the answer takes a bit of creative thinking and is often not so apparent. Take for instance one question, “From the Latin for end, this is where trains can also originate.” The correct answer, “terminus” was given by Jennings. Watson, gave the incorrect answer for the question, but technically got the part right about “From Latin for end” with its answer, “finis.” It’s these types of subtleties that Watson was unable to grasp.
Likewise, Watson missed the Final Jeopardy clue about a city with two airports, one named after a WWII hero and the other after a WWII battle. Both Jennings and Rutter guessed Chicago, the correct response. Watson, on the other hand, wrote, “What is Toronto??????” The strange thing is the category was “U.S. Cities.” Thankfully for Watson he bet a computer-like figure of $947 and still leads by a mile after one game.
The biggest surprise, though it shouldn’t have been, is that Watson can’t hear. On Monday’s show, Watson gave the same wrong answer that Jennings gave seconds earlier. He’s a brilliant computing machine, but he can’t hear what the other contestants say. Score one more for man.
Of course, the win-win for humans is that even with Watson cruising to victory over the humans, the fact still remains he was created by them. He (really “it”) owes his existence to man. He would be nothing without the uber-smart people at IBM. So I’m left marveling at the genius of man to invent a computer that can surpass human knowledge in so many ways and yet is dependent on human knowledge for its existence and can still miss the Final Jeopardy clue many educated (and frequent flying) Americans would know.
One thing is for sure: no one who watched Jeopardy! yesterday should wonder if those three amazing contestants–brilliant and intelligent as they are–are not the product of a yet more intelligent designer. What a marvel is man. And what a marvel is the Maker.
