"Watson -- I need you"

IBM rolled out the publicity bandwagon for its newest supercomputer, Watson's, triumphant appearance on a special edition of Jeopardy a few days ago. For those of you who've been either adrift at sea or doing a Rip van Winkle, Watson was "trained" to understand and respond to the colloquial and ambiguous and clues made famous by the TV quiz show, It (he?) soundly defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two highest scoring (human) players in the program's long history.

Technically, the event was everything IBM could have hoped for. Watson interpreted and made sense of normal human speech, even with quirky phrasing, inside jokes and backwards (answers first, then questions) and was therefore a technical landmark of the first order. Presumably, we can now expect to have Watson clones at cash registers, toll booths and phone answering services worldwide.

But Maybe Not. In Jeopardy, one contestant at a time picks a category from those offered, and is given the clue. Their edge is simply that; they can choose the category (and, of course, the amount they wish to bet.) However, any contestant can capture that point by pressing their button first and then providing the correct answer. If they're right, they can continue. If they're wrong, the next contestant can pick a category and try to answer, again by first pressing the button. Watson followed the same rules, with (minor) exceptions for machines..

There are two points that I have not been seen discussed, though they have significant implications for Watson's success. The first is that Watson "heard" the clues delivered in the form of a text file, sent at the same time as Ken and Brad (and the audience) listened to it read..This appears to mean that Watson had the information to "think" about well ahead of its competitors. This may not have been important by itself, but it supported the second and more obvious advantage. Watson was able not only to process the information faster; it also could "push" the button faster -- indeed. more or less instantly.

These possibilities are important because Watson's success involved long runs of answers with no discernible pauses. Part of Watson's edge was perhaps not only because of the quality of its "thinking" but also its speed. If Watson had been programmed to mimic human capacities, it might not have done as well.

Bottom line: Watson is a technical tour de force, no doubt. But it doesn't quite answer the original question, "Can it beat human experts at a game like Jeopardy?" It may still be that Brad and Ken had all the answers that Watson did, but that they were systematically disadvantaged by the mechanical advantages -- not the intelligence -- of any computer. IBM is chock-a-block full of very smart people, so I have to believe that they were perfectly aware of all this, and precisely because of it, playing Jeopardy was a can't lose proposition. Ken and Brad should not feel bad; under the circumstances, I say, three cheers for humanity!