Blog: What Is IBM's Watson?

What Is IBM's Watson?
New York Times Magazine (06/14/10) Thompson, Clive

IBM artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have labored for the last three years to create a machine that can understand questions in natural language and respond quickly with precise, factual answers. The result is the Watson supercomputer, which has been pitted against human players in Jeopardy tournaments. Watson is the product of IBM's grand challenge to meet the real-world necessity of precise question-answering, and key to its development was the shift in AI research toward statistical computation of vast corpora of documents. This shift was facilitated by the decreasing cost of computing power, an explosion of online text generation, and the development of linguistic tools that helped machines puzzle through language. Watson was fed millions of documents, and the system can tackle a Jeopardy clue thousands of times concurrently using more than 100 algorithms simultaneously. However, creative wordplay can sometimes trip Watson up. On the other hand, its lack of emotion and stress is an advantage over human players. IBM's David Ferrucci believes Watson may be modeling certain ways that the human brain processes language. IBM's John Kelly thinks that Watson's question-answering capabilities could aid greatly in rapid decision-making.

View Full Article