Watson does not have a squishy pinkish gray brain made of cells and neurons Instead its intelligence comes from a room full of whirring machinery 750 powerful computer servers linked in a high speed network cooled by large refrigerator units The servers provide 15 terabytes of memory and the computing power of 2 800 regular computers During the Jeopardy game Watson was not linked to the Internet Instead it accessed millions of pages of research material loaded onto its servers books movie scripts encyclopedias and more How could Watson possibly get an answer wrong with so much information at its disposal The tricky part for Watson was not recalling trivia it was understanding the clues Learning Natural Language Anyone who has ever tried to learn a new language knows words can be tricky Some words and phrases mean more than one thing For example consider these two sentences An athlete runs on a track and A car runs on gas The meanings of run and on are different in each sentence After all the car is not scampering across a pool of gas It is very difficult to teach a computer which meaning applies in any particular sentence Scientists who work on artificial intelligence A refer to the sentences people speak every day as natural language Typically computers follow instructions in programming languages which are written in code In these computer languages the words must be very precise Each word or symbol means one thing But most people do not know how to write code Therefore a computer that can understand natural language makes communication between people and machines easier and more straightforward for everyone 6
Trivia Time In the game of Jeopardy players are told the answers and each response must be in the form of a question Here are some samples from Watson's appearance on the show The top row gives the categories and the bottom row gives the answers Can you beat the computer by figuring out the questions NAME THE DECADE LITERARY CHARACTER APB ALTERNATE MEANINGS ALSO ON YOUR COMPUTER KEYS FINAL FRONTIERS DISNEYLAND OPENS THE PEACE SYMBOL IS CREATED HIS VICTIMS INCLUDE TICKETS AREN T NEEDED CHARITY BURBAGE MAD A PIECE OF WOOD FROM A IT S AN ABBREVIATION FOR THIS EVENT A EYE MOODY SEVERUSTREE OR TO PUNCTURE FOR GRAND PRIXAUTO BLACK HOLE S BOUNDARY SNAPE HE D BE EASIER WITH SOMETHING FROM WHICH MATTER RACING TO CATCH IF YOU D JUST POINTED CAN T ESCAPE NAME HIM Correct response What are the 1950s Correct response Who is Voldemort Correct response What is a stick Correct response What is F1 Correct response What is on event horizon Watson Watson Watson Unsure Watson Unsure Watson Unsure Correct Correct
Where Is Watson Now Watson can do much more than compete on a quiz Imagine walking up to a computer telling it your show Now the same AI technology that played symptoms and then finding out what's wrong and on Jeopardy helps doctors treat patients New what the best treatment is all in natural language medical information comes out every day and it is IBM's Watson technology also helped write a impossible for doctors to read and learn about every cookbook Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson new discovery They need an easy way to search IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education all that data The system clinicalKey uses Watson's gave Watson a database of online recipes DeepOA technology to search thousands of medical nutritional facts and flavor research Then journals textbooks and reports with this type of the supercomputer came up with entirely new technology a future with robot doctors is possible dishes including Italian pumpkin cheesecake The technology company IBM spent three years working on an AI technology called DeepQA that could answer natural language questions quickly and correctly The goal was to match or even beat human performance They chose Jeopardy as a test because the show uses natural language covers many different topics requires answers in less than three seconds and has penalties for wrong answers Watson used the DeepOA technology to answer questions during the quiz show appearance With each clue Watson used more than 100 different techniques to understand the clue decide how to search for answers and rank all the possible answers Each answer gets a confidence score that measures how likely it is to be correct To prepare for the show Watson trained hard working through more than 100 000 sample Jeopardy questions When it made a mistake the IBM team could teach Watson how to handle that type of clue
Doctors began using Watson to help determine treatment options for This Jeopardyl match took place in February 2011 over two days Jennings and Rutter cancer patients got lots of right answers but not enough to beat Watson The computer won easily with a final score of 77 147more than the two humans scores
