Jeopardy! competition is a popular US quiz show featuring trivia in various topics (history, literature, the arts, pop culture, science, sports, geography, wordplay, etc.), broadcasted since 1964. The show has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and they must phrase their responses in form of a question.

During the show two matches will be played over three consecutive days, with a slight modification of the rules: Watson will receive his phrases electronically while the human contestants will both be able to read and hear the text as spoken by the show’s host Alex Trebek. Both human contestants and Watson will speak their answers out loud (in Watson’s case – in a synthesised voice) and they will choose follow-up questions.

In 2007 a small group of IBM scientists led by dr David Ferrucci aimed at building Watson by starting a project called DeepQA.

What is Watson?

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Senior, is a computing system incorporating questions and answering technology.  It is forecasted that this new IBM’s natural language technology will revolutionise many scientific fields and will change the way people interact with computers and machines.

The Jeopardy! format provides the ultimate challenge for Watson because - in order to win the show - contestants need to have good knowledge across various randomly chosen topics. The role of the presenter is to give answers to the contestants, and then they have to come up with a question for that answer as quickly as possible.  If a player buzzes in and gets the question wrong, he or she is penalized. Therefore, a challenge for a winning computer system is to decide whether or not it has a correct understanding of the question and high enough confidence in its answer, the ability to “know what it knows”. Watson designers believe that the supercomputer is sufficiently developed and ready for the Jeopardy challenge, which involves not only language understanding and generation, but also analysing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not.

According to BBC, dr David Ferrucci said that in the past the “human has had to adapt to the computer working with classic search” and that Watson changes everything by “getting the computer to work in human terms. Rather than mapping words to words which is easy for a computer to do, it now has to map meaning to meaning and that is a much bigger challenge.”

Watson is not the first machine to battle against men. In 1997, another IBM computer called Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

Future applications of Watson’s technology?

IBM’s director of research dr John E. Kelly III said: “This represents a new level of communications between computers and human beings. What we are doing is creating a system that will be able to be applied to all sorts of applications in the world and essentially cut the time to find answers to very difficult problems.” According to IBM this new natural language technology could be applied in areas such as: healthcare (to help accurately diagnose patients), online customer service (to improve online self-service help desks), tourism (to provide tourists and citizens with specific information regarding cities), mobile customer service (prompt customer support via phone), and much more.

Showtime?

This man vs machine Jeopardy battle will be television on February 14, 15 and 16, 2011.

Contestants? The contestants are Ken Jennings who won 74 Jeopardy games in a row and Brad Rutter, who scored the most money with winnings of more than $3m.

Prize? The grand prize for this competition will be $1 million.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33233.wss