Watson will be competing against humans on Jeopardy, the popular quiz show. IBM is hoping that Watson will be able to understand complex questions—presumably from Alex Trebek—and answer them fast enough to compete with humans.
The knowledge part of Jeopardy—history, culture, science and other topics—can be packed into Watson. What’s unclear is whether the system can get all the nuances of the clues.
IBM's computing system — called a Question Answering (QA) system among computer scientists — has been under development for nearly two years. With the April 27 announcement, IBM's researchers plan to put it to the test in a machine versus human contest on the gold-standard quiz show. And, officials from Jeopardy! announced plans to produce a human vs. machine contest on the renowned show.
Code-named "Watson," the IBM computing system is being designed to rival the human mind's ability to determine precise answers to natural language questions and to compute accurate confidences in the answers. According to Dr. David Ferrucci, leader of the project team, "The confidence processing ability is key to winning at Jeopardy! and is critical to implementing useful business applications of Question Answering."
Watson will also incorporate massively parallel analytical capabilities and, just like human competitors, Watson will not be connected to the Internet or have any other outside assistance.
