Artificial Intelligence: Building Smarter Machines
artificial intelligence building smarter Machines STEPHANIE SAMMARTINO MCPHERSON TWENT Y-FIRST CENTURY BOOKS MINNEAPOLIS
The term artificial intelligence The term refers to robots computers and other machines with a humanlike ability to reason and solve problems and solve problems CHAPTER 1 DAWN OF A NEW AGE The popular television program Jeopardy had never generated so much excitement The date was February 11 2011 Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter the two top winners in the game show’s twenty-seven year history had returned to vie for a 1 million prize But the real star of the show the reason for all the anticipation was the third contestant Watson was a smart machine an artificial intelligence AI developed over four years by twenty-five computer engineers at the technology corporation IBM The engineers had designed Watson specifically to challenge Jeopardy champions 4 Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence machinery with the ability to reason and solve problems was nothing new For decades scientists had been trying with limited success to instill basic human skills such as understanding language and recognizing objects into machines Jeopardy posed especially formidable challenges A game show with a twist Jeopardy reverses the normal question and-answer format Instead of asking questions show host Alex Trebek gives answers called clues and contestants provide the questions For example if Trebek says the author of Harry Potter the contestant who hits a buzzer first replies Who is J K Rowling Watson had to comprehend the full meaning of each clue to succeed at Jeopardy Was the phrasing straightforward or tricky Did it involve word play or humor Watson would require a huge knowledge base to cover the broad range of categories everything from sports to science to popular culture that show up on Jeopardy To prepare for the show computer scientists downloaded vast amounts of information from the Internet to give Watson the huge number of facts that it needed Just like any other contestant Watson has been studying up said a member of the Watson team before the contest Ken Jennings left and Brad Rutter right compete with Watson center an artificial intelligence created by IBM during a practice round on the TV quiz show Jeopardy In the final contest Watson beat out the two humans to win a 1 million prize Dawn of a New Age 5
