IBM's 'Watson' to Take On 'Jeopardy'

From PCMag.com (April 27):

IBM said Monday that it plans to produce "Watson," a computing system designed to parse questions intelligently and respond in the manner in which it was intended.

The goal? To knock off human contestants in "Jeopardy," in much the same way IBM's "Deep Blue" computer beat Garry Kasparov in chess.

Watson will be forced to interpret the question, process puns and other word games, search through its database and determine the correct answer, all within less than a second -- the reaction time of "Jeopardy" players. The machine will not be connected to the Internet, but will have to parse its own database of content. [read more]

Interesting. If this works it will be a big milestone for AI.

IBM could write a similar program for the "Wheel of Fortune" game although a little bit trickier. They could program the computer to know the frequency count of letters and use its knowledge base to "guess" the phrase. The tricky part is that IBM would have to build a robot to spin the wheel or have a person do it.

One of these days computers are going to take over tech support. The electric companies already has automated systems that respond to your voice commands over the phone. At least mine does.