The Grumpy Room

So I guess IBM has been working on developing a computer that can play Jeopardy. They say it is capable of beating humans on a regular basis. Their eventual goal is for it to play on the actual Jeopardy show.

Watson, as the machine is called, is not connected to the Internet during games so it has to process the question, decide if it is worth ringing in, and signal to answer in a matter of a couple seconds. In addition to making decisions on answering, Watson considers the current state of the game in whether or not to guess.

What makes this problem so difficult is that the problem of playing Jeopardy is not a well-defined one. There is no optimal strategy or sequence of moves that Watson can make to guarantee a win. Just understanding the correct semantic meaning of the question is a very difficult problem. In addition there are essentially unlimited potential categories that the questions could come from, so storing and searching the appropriate information in a very short amount of time is very daunting. However if IBM succeeds in creating a system that can handle natural language in real-time, such a system would have a lot potential for some really interesting applications.

Maybe next year IBM will let me borrow Watson to take the online Jeopardy test…