Occasionally, just before I sit down to write this article, I freeze and can’t think of a good subject. Tonight was one of those nights until my brother asked me about a project IBM is involved. Most of the time these are based on customer commentaries throughout the week; however, this week I’m relying on my brother’s interest level in the IBM Watson project to guide me.
About this time last year I wrote about the handheld spherical game called 21 Questions and its uncanny ability to read a player’s mind. I wrote that it used artificial intelligence based on prior correct answers to remove the guesswork. Through elaborate research performed on the manufacturer’s website, 21 Questions is able to correctly guess the right answer around 90% of the time.
Think of Watson as a giant 21 Questions game with the ability to think and process data like a human. The giant supercomputer can think and process data so much like a human, when placed competitively against the best Jeopardy players it wins. In fact, one of the motivations behind Watson was to compete against humans on the television show Jeopardy.
One evening while watching Jeopardy a senior engineer at IBM thought it would be pretty interesting to build a computer with the intent of competing on the TV show. He rallied IBM’s top computer engineers and programmers to work on the Watson project and committed much of the group’s time to building this elaborate computer.
Computers already exist that can ask Jeopardy based questions; however, no computer existed that had the power to compete against humans. Humans can process tons of data and can interpret tonal and grammatical changes. Our brains can transform complex thoughts and make sense of them; computers until this point could only recognize and process basic information.
I’m a little confused about what I just wrote, so I imagine readers may also be confused. A typical phrase you or I might hear during normal conversation may be “I took a picture of a dog wearing my shoes.” Out of context, this sentence may imply the dog was wearing my shoes. However, it could also mean I was wearing my shoes while snapping the picture.
During initial testing, IBM’s supercomputer had a very difficult time understanding the complexities of human language. When placed against humans in their initial Jeopardy screening, Watson performed poorly. It wasn’t until many days of simulated questions and answers that the computer started to understand, learn, and process questions correctly.
Artificial intelligence is really neat stuff. Rather than simply spit back an answer, artificial intelligence based computers process answers partly based on prior responses. In other words, if an answer is incorrect, the computer re-thinks how it came about getting the answer and tries better next time. IBM’s Watson ranks responses based on its confidence level prior to answering.
Without getting into all the technical mumbo jumbo of how the Watson project functions, it’s interesting to know that Watson is made up of many separate IBM servers linked together. More than three different computer languages were used to create Watson’s operating system. When all is said and done, Watson can process approximately 500 gigabytes of data per second and only relies on stored data for reference.
It’s crazy to have a supercomputer developed solely to play a television game show. IBM sees a diverse potential with these systems. It may be a short amount of time before we see this technology being used in places computers haven’t been previously allowed. The IBM team behind Watson sees a future in replacing technical support staff and answering first-tier medical questions. I’m curious to see where this technology takes us.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him directly at (978) 919-8059) or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.