IBM's Watson Wins on Jeopardy!

The three-day competition against contestants Watson, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy! was all the buzz this week. While Ken and Brad are familiar human Jeopardy! mega-champions, Watson is a supercomputer with 16 terabytes of memory, designed to compete on the quizshow as part of IBM's Greatest Challenge.  By earning $77,147 in total earnings, more that the the combined score of Jennings ($24,000) and Rutter ($21,600), Watson won $1M to which will be donated to charity Vision Source.

I was fortunate to meet Dr. Bill Murdock, a member of the DeepQA research team in IBM's Watson Research Center, at an Emory Computer Science Colloquium yesterday.  Bill Murdock helped Watson distinguish correct answers from wrong answers by building components that apply logic, learning, and analogy to the results of natural language processing.  He worked on this IBM Greatest Challenge since the project initiated in 2006 and developed many of the DeepQA components used in the Watson question answering system, particularly in the areas of typing answers and evaluating evidence from passages.

Although Watson's answers were sometimes not relevant and far from correct (think:  Toronto as a US city), more often then not, he answered with speed and confidence.  However, the answers he searched for were all facts known by some human on this Earth.  What if we could program a computer to think and create new ideas?   Will Watson's offspring prove century old conjectures on Mathematics?  What do you propose to be the next IBM Greatest Challenge? 

Congratulations, Watson!!