Supercomputer trounces human champions in TV trivia quiz show

Feb 17, 2011, 5:19 GMT

Los Angeles - A powerful supercomputer trounced two human champions on a special-edition of the US game show Jeopardy Thursday, 15 years after the machine known as Deep Blue beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1996.

As in that historic case the supercomputer in Thursday's victory, given the name Watson, was made by IBM.

The US technology company said that the quiz required non-linear thinking and natural language questioning, a far stiffer challenge for computers than the straight logical calculations of chess.

Following three sessions of the classic US quiz show Watson had amassed 77,000 dollars, to put him ahead of the two previous Jeopardy champions who racked up 24,000 dollars and 21,600 dollars respectively.

The quiz show, which has been running since 1964, presents trivia to the contestants in the form of answers, to which they must guess the correct question.

Watson has the processing power of 2,800 powerful computers. Built from 10 racks of IBM servers, it has 15 terabytes of random access memory (RAM) and access to over 200 million pages of content.

It did not have the advantage of internet access. It was represented in the contest by a screen placed between two human contestants on which a bar graph showed its top three options and its level of confidence in the answers.

On the last question of the note, when Watson's victory was already clear, one of the human contestants wrote the answer , 'I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.'

David Ferrucci, the IBM scientist who led the development of Watson, said the machine would help people reach a greater understanding of humanity but would not be a substitute.

'Human intelligence is a whole other leap,' he said. 'A computer doesn't know what it means to be human.'

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