The game Jeopardy is broadcasted by an American television and it is the kind of contest, where the players must answer to some questions, which are not always easy. The name of the supercomputer created by IBM who managed to win 77000 dollars is Watson. The other players with whom the computer was in the competition won 21000 dollars (Brad Rutter) and 24000 dollars (Ken Jennings).
A few years ago, Watson participated at this contest again, but it did not manage to answer to more than 20% of the total questions it was asked. And by the time it processed a question and found the answer, it was a matter of hours, not seconds like the other week. A researchers which worked at this project explained how the robot was built and on what it is based its capacity of betting some unusual bets. The researchers though it would be too common to make the robot to bet like any human being, so they added a few dollars, random dollar amounts for kicks. The programming langauges used to create the robot are Java and C++.
Taking into account this performance of remembering so many questions and the fact that the robot returned responses in a matter of seconds, we cannot help but thinking where this robot could have a place. An actual place, not participating at the contests. The researchers say that this robot can be used in medicine, because it has the capacity of analyzing enourmous quantities of data and this could be a real help for diagnosing more rapidly patients which have serious health problems. The robot will not be used only by itself. If this technology works in the medical field, probably more “brothers” will be built, which is a natural step towards evolution.
The IBM machine, which beat all the human players at the Jeopardy contest is now the contestant which is no longer from the human race. When first read this line on the Internet today, I thought that perhaps the authors of the article refer to the fact that the player is so good, so that he or she could not be considered as belonging to the human race. But what the authors wanted to say is that the current winner of the Jeopardy contest is a machine. You know how they speak of Roger Federer everytime he wins a tennis match. They say that he is not from Earth. In this way, you can say about the last week’s winner of Jeopardy. The difference is that it is from Earth, built by humans, but with far more extraordinary abilities than a human being, at least when it comes to memory and logical connections that it does in its “head”.
You can see videos of John Prager, one of the developers who worked at this project on the Internet and see his opinion about this new robot and the ways in which the humans can use it from now on.
