Elementary, my dear IBM. On Thursday, the software giant will know if he was right to call his new super computer "Watson". From this Monday evening in fact, the machine will try to beat in three sets, two champions of Jeopardy, the famous American game of questions and answers.
Watson will afffronter Ken Jennings, who has won 74 successive victories - a record - and Brad Rutter, who pocketed $ 3.2 million, the largest jackpot ever won by a player since the start of the game, 1964.
That the human brain synapses or circuits of the 20 servers that run Watson will win?
The three game sessions have already been recorded, but all participants have made vows of silence.The winner will walk away with $ 1 million, a tidy sum that IBM promised to donate to a charity if they win.
The voice of HAL
To achieve this historic show, Jeopardy has relocated the headquarters of IBM. Not easy to install on a TV set to a computer the size of 10 refrigerators ... Watson is shown on a screen with a trademark logo and answered questions with a voice based on that of HAL, the diabolic computer from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey.""We did it on purpose so well remember that this is a machine and not a human being," said an IBM engineer in American cultural magazine The New Yorker. "
If participation of a system of artificial intelligence Jeopardy is a first in the history of the game experience is, it, not without precedent. In 1997, IBM - already - had challenged the world champion chess while considered by some as the best player of all time, Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue, the computer developed by the software giant to challenge the human brain on the subject, came to the end of the Russian champion after six innings.To explain its superiority, while some had argued that chess was a game based heavily on the computing power of the players and their ability to anticipate the moves of their opponent. A godsend for a supercomputer, so to speak.
Grasshoppers eat kosher?
Hence the importance of the challenge that IBM wanted to meet this time. To defeat the man in Jeopardy, the machine will in effect be limited to knowledge of the "Encyclopedia Universalis" at the end of electrical circuits. Watson will also be able to understand the subtleties of language, some questions based on puns or implied meaning.
An obstacle that Watson seems able to overcome ...During a training session in mid-January, the machine only gave good answers. Although it may sometimes also known some hiccups ... sometimes difficult to understand. Example: "To the question: 'What eats grasshoppers?" Watson replied that we were eating kosher ...", remembers a bit taken aback Ferruci Dave, one of the project at IBM Watson .
If the computer beats his opponents, no doubt that the old fear of domination of man by machines resurface. Far from the novels of Isaac Asimov and others, however, IBM said that a possible victory of her baby could open the way to genuine scientific progress.As the ability for machines to make the connection between a list of symptoms, the question of a doctor and an unmatched library of medical cases worldwide.
