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Monday, February 14, 2011

Significance of Watson and Jeopardy

In KurzweilAI:  a good piece on the artificial intelligence of the upcoming Jeopardy challenge using the IBM Watson computer.  Ray Kurzweil on the meaning of computer machine challenges in games and Jeopardy to AI.  I have followed the game playing aspects of AI experimentation since their beginning. Although a powerful experiment in the right direction, it has never met the expectations of delivering the providing the  broad problem solving needs of the enterprise.

Update:  I saw the first half hour of this competition.  Far too small a sample to make much of a conclusion about the generality of the technique.  Watson did not have a connection to the Web, so no outside help.  Though very large databases could have been downloaded and indexed ahead of time. Watson was very impressive, getting what I perceived to be very hard questions and missing some easier ones.  Most impressive the interpretation of natural language.  Would like to see many more examples to see how this might be used say in an interface within the enterprise to answer questions that included both internal and expernal information, using informal business language.

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