Supercomputer Watson Beats Two Human Jeopardy Champions (Video)

An IBM supercomputer beat two human champions of the popular quiz show Jeopardy during a demonstration round on January 13, several international news sites reported.

Supercomputer Watson, named for IBM‘s founder, was reported to be specifically designed to compete in the quiz show. It was programmed to understand natural human language. It is built from 10 racks of IBM servers, has access to over 200 million pages of content and has 15 terabytes of RAM. However, it did not have internet access.

On the demonstration round which took place at a computer lab at IBM‘s research headquarters, Watson was pitted against Ken Jennings, the longest player in the game show’s history who won 74 consecutive matches, and Brad Rutter, the all-time money winner of the show winning $3.3 million. Watson correctly answered about half of the 15 questions to win the game.

“After four years, our scientific team believes that Watson is ready for this challenge based on its ability to rapidly comprehend what the Jeopardy clue is asking, analyze the information it has access to, come up with precise answers, and develop an accurate confidence in its response,” David Ferrucci, a scientist who leads the IBM Research team that built Watson, was quoted saying.

Here is a preview of the demonstration round courtesy of Engadget:

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