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Thursday, 01 July 2010 |
“You kno w my methods, Watson.” Sherlock Holmes used that phrase in five different stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Being elementary, it seems likely that Watson did indeed know Holmes’ methods. But could Holmes have guessed Watson’s methods? Did he even care or was he just a flaming narcissist who just assumed everyone knew? Of course he wasn’t — he was a brilliant fictional detective who gave the world a wonderful story line and a few really great phrases. Besides, even if he had known something about the methods of his 19th century associate, there is no way even Holmes could have deduced the methods of the 21st century Watson.
Watson lives. Actually, he lives to play Jeopardy. Watson is a computer designed by IBM to bring computing into an era that was ruined nearly 40 years ago by Star Trek. In the 1960s, Captain Kirk would talk to the computer on board the Starship Enterprise and it would answer. He didn’t need to use a keyboard or a mouse or even phrase his questions in a way the computer would understand. He just talked to it. It was a heady time in the 60s, those of us as childr
Watson and the New York Times gives you a chance to try your hand at beating a computer at Jeopardy.
But for an entity made up of wire and silicon chips, human conversation is a huge deal. Bigger, even, than making a car fly. Nuances in human conversation don’t work well with a computer that functions exclusively in a binary world of ones and zeros.
A recent New York Times Magazine article made the Holmes / Watson connection to IBM’s Watson computer. Watson (the computer), however, was not named for Holmes’ fictional sidekick but in honor of Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM. Yet the analogy is apt.
In 1996, an IBM computer named Deep Blue became the first machine to beat a reigning world chess champion in a game of chess. The champion, Garry Kasparov, lost the game but won the battle, winning three of the following five games. The next year, however, Deep Blue came back to defeat Kasparov, winning the best part of six games.
Thirteen years later, IBM is back with Watson, the computer designed to play Jeopardy. Why Jeopardy? Because it is a game that requires knowledge and a thorough understanding of the subtleties of the English language. Contestants in the game are presented with often nuanced, sometimes pun-like clues to answers to which they must provide the questions. If a computer can manage Jeopardy, that is awfully close to a computer that can communicate fully with humans.
As for the Times analogy, it is apt because, as the article points out, a Jeopardy clue such as, “The name of this hat is elementary, my dear contestant,” immediately brings forth an image of Sherlock Holmes to us humans because we’ve frequently heard and stored away the phrase, “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.” We simply learned it. But to a computer, there are no equivalent neural pathways to travel for odd tidbits of information. The computer can’t “remember” anything that it hasn’t specifically been told, nor can it make inductive leaps. The words, “elementary” and “my dear contestant” mean nothing to it because there is no neural pathway leading to “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.”
Watson, however, was designed to forge its own neural pathways through the brute force of computing power. It takes the clue phrase and comes up with a list of possible connections and then narrows down that list until it comes to what it feels is the best answer: Holmes’ deerstalker hat.
Watson isn’t connected to the Web for data collection. Instead, IBM’s research team input untold pages from books and research papers to provide its basis of knowledge. It doesn’t Google anything, it relies on the “brain” and knowledge IBM gave it.
Watson is a computer that is designed to go beyond data to look for hidden meanings in human speech. IBM sees the business potential for a computer that can understand humans and give them the answer they really want — which may or may not be from the question they actually asked.
Yes, your home PC can talk. But just ask it, “How’s it hanging today?” and you won’t want to wait for the reply. It not only has no idea; it doesn’t much care. Computers may be able to speak but, until Watson came along, they have been unable to actually converse.
Now, how ‘bout getting to work on those flying cars and jet packs?
You can play Jeopardy against Watson on the web, courtesy of the New York Times at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watson-trivia-game.html
In this version of the game, you are given a distinct advantage — Watson will wait for you to make the first move. One of the most interesting aspects of the interactive game is seeing the list of responses that Watson considered. It gives you a bit of an insight into the mind of the computer. As it were… of sorts… I think…
To read the article, visit www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html. For more information and a video about Watson, visit www.research.ibm.com/deepqa.
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