After 3 nights of excitement, Watson finally demonstrates it is well above human beings. Does that make Watson or the computers superior to mankind? Well to some extent yes and to some no. Watson does have some serious holes in its algorithm and by now its creator are aware of that. Watson is smart and it does have extraordinary speed while taking decisions, but what it lacks is the accuracy in providing the results (sometimes). I mean who could have imagined that Watson after answering some really tough questions will consider Toronto to be the part of the US.
Anyway, out an out it was a decent competition and both Brad & Ken put up a fantastic fight. Ken proved that though he lacks in the total earning when competing with Brad he does have the power to turn the game around and he does demonstrates that by becoming # 2 in the final standings. In the first two nights Ken was # 3 but last night he played really well and so does Brad.
Final Jeopardy standings:
Watson at # 1 with total earnings of 77,147 (grrrrr)
Ken at # 2 with total earnings of 24,000
Brad at # 3 with total earnings of 21,600
IBM has proved again that when it comes to the contest between man and machine their machines are more superior then any of us. Investors of IBM, should be happy and proud to be investing in a company which is capable of producing such resolute & invincible supercomputers. Jeopardy was one of the primary reasons for the existence of Watson. Post Jeopardy, IBM will be using Watson to make critical decisions in the field of science, medicine and finance. To know more details about the Watson project check out here.
So what is next in line for IBM? Couple of miles from my house, there is a huge facility where IBM is building its new Petascale supercomputer which goes by the name of Blue Waters. UIUC and NCSA (The birthplace of 1st graphical web browser Mosaic) are partners with IBM on this project. Once online (sometime this year) Blue Waters will be capable of handling 10 petaflops (10 quadrillion calculations every second) during its peak processing. I know these numbers are abstruse, but this is IBM and we all know what it is capable of.
Back to the results of Jeopardy, I guess last night though Watson emerged out as a champion but if you look from where I am looking humankind is the true winner. Not only we as human beings, have made computers smart enough we have given the machines their true identity. We have made computers more than a number crunching machine. In return machines have taught us, though we are their creators but we as human beings still had a lot to learn from them and a lot more to learn about them. Whenever I encounter something as interesting as human beings learning from machines (though not relevant in this blog), I recall one of my all time favorite movie quotes from Terminator 2: Judgment day - if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too..
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