Smartest Machine on Earth to Take on Jeopardy! Grand Champions

From Geeks are Sexy Technology News:

This week, an episode of NOVA 1covered Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed to interpret and understand natural human language, with all its ambiguity: wordplay, puns, double-meanings, intuitive differentiations and subtlety. Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, 2is the result of the DeepQA Project, 3the goal of which is to create a computer system that can "deliver precise, meaningful responses, and synthesize, integrate, and rapidly reason over the breadth of human knowledge as it is most rapidly and naturally produced — in natural language text." IBM believes (and is exhibiting rather impressively) that this may be achieved through a combination of advancements in natural language processing, information retrieval (from millions of stored documents), machine learning, knowledge representation and reasoning, processed simultaneously through parallel computations. The ultimate test of IBM's research? A show-down episode of Jeopardy!, wherein Watson takes on Ken Jennings, 4the show's 74-game champion, and Brad Rutter, 5the all-time monetary winner of the game. It airs Monday, February 14, 2011.

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