Not So Elementary

Like many others last week, I have closely followed with interest the games of "Jeopardy! The IBM Challenge". For those who weren't aware of what went on the past few days: The IBM Research group has built a computer system capable of answering questions in Jeopardy!. They named it Watson. And in a historic event, Watson competed last week with former Jeopardy! champions in a two-game charity fundraiser.

Now, some would ask what the big deal is all about. After all, we use computers all the time to answer things for us. We have Google, Wikipedia, and loads of others. The big deal is that Watson is able to answer questions in natural language. It's harder than it seems. It took the team over four years to develop the system. Watson is made up of "a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM." A machine needs that much power and processing to be able to compete with humans in a game show.

I've seen the IBM officially-released videos, the PBS NOVA documentary "The Smartest Machine on Earth", and the actual Jeopardy! games themselves. What I find most fascinating about the Watson project is not the technological aspect of it. Although, from someone who majored in Computer Science, I could appreciate the immense breakthrough in NLP and machine learning algorithms. And excited how these new advances can have practical applications in other fields.

The most interesting part about this for me is observing the people surrounding Watson. Dr. David Ferrucci, the Principal Investigator of the project, is very defensive of Watson. During the practice games in IBM, he was very annoyed at the stand-in host who often made fun of Watson's way-off-the-mark answers. I guess if I spent the last four years of my life building something and all my efforts were being mocked, I would be very frustrated, too. 

Todd Crain, the comedian who was hosted the practice games, just couldn't resist the wisecracks since Watson was the perfect "straight man" of a comedic duo. Watson doesn't know that some of his answers are funny and he doesn't know that he's being made fun of. For a host, I guess it's very hard to pass up on the chance for a comic relief in an otherwise very cerebral activity. 

Dr. David Gondek leads the Strategy Team of Watson and is responsible for keeping its answers closer to the correct ones and far from hilarious inappropriateness. One of my favorite parts of the PBS documentary was during a practice game when the category "Celebrations of the Month" stumped Watson. Unlike the humans, it did not readily recognize that the answers should be months of the year. But thanks to a fix that allowed Watson to be informed of the answers after it has been revealed to the other contestants, it was able to learn the pattern. So after four clues of "learning" in that category, when Watson was able to answer the final clue, I was as thrilled as Dr. Gondek when he said, "He got it!"

The IBM team basically treats Watson as their child. They are very supportive of it, very proud of it, and yes, protective of it. The games are held at IBM and the audience is full of the company's engineers and executives. As Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings has put it, it was "an away game for humanity". Jennings holds the 74-game winning streak record for Jeopardy!. He is known for his subtle humor and even inserted the following line in the final jeopardy round against Watson: "I for one welcome our new computer overlords".

Watson may know that the quote is from The Simpsons. That it was from the episode "Deep Space Homer". But for all its efficiency and capabilities, I don't think it knows why it is funny. Not yet, anyway.