Thursday, January 13, 2011

Skynet Becomes Self Aware, Defeats Ken Jennings in Jeopardy!

In February, IBM's Watson supercomputer will challenge past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter over 3-days. Today, they did a practice round, and someone bootlegged a bit of it and posted it. Jeopardy! is challenging because it has such a high level of word play and involves "natural language processing". Understanding the context of English sentences isn't something computers do very well.

I can't embed it, but go watch it. Now. It will blow your mind.

Update: if you follow the link, there's now an interview with Dave Gondek of IBM. Gondek, it turns out, was a grad student at Brown when I was an undergrad. This may not make him the most famous person actually know, but it sure makes him the most awesome. Well done, sir, well done.

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