By now, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the news that IBM’s computer, Watson, bested two of the greatest human champions of the game show "Jeopardy!" Even though Watson blundered on one question on the first day, and mishandled the Final Jeopardy question on the second day, it has demonstrated that it can successfully compete with the two most successful players the show has ever seen. Any of us would lose to either of them.
The question is: What’s under Watson's hood? IBM isn’t saying much about the technical side of things, except that the company built the computer "on commercially available POWER7 systems [which] ensures the acceleration of businesses adopting workload optimized systems in industries where knowledge acquisition and analytics are important." Some are calling it a "super search engine." But Watson’s success is a fine reason for me to tell you more about what IBM has said about Watson, and to explain the concept of “concept search.”
Let’s walk through the "Jeopardy!" process. At the top of the show, the categories are revealed and verbalized by host Alex Trebek. The game starts when a contestant chooses a category, and a clue is revealed. For those of us at home, that’s when the clue is shown on screen. We read the clue while we listen to Trebek read it to us, which takes about three seconds.
According to Dr. Eric Brown, an IBM research manager who works with Watson (whose core technology is called “DeepQA,” for “deep question-answering”), Watson is not listening to Trebek when he’s reading the clue. So speech recognition is not involved. Instead, Watson is taking a snapshot of the clue when it’s revealed and processing words. Now doesn’t that sound familiar? (You can read the Kurzweil website interview with Brown, from which the quotes in this article are taken, here.)
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Source: law.com
By: Nick Brestoff
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