The final round in the epic man vs. machine battle that's been playing out on Jeopardy! all week was fought tonight. The winner: Watson, IBM's supercomputer, who soundly defeated flesh-and-blood opponents Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, ending a three-night tournament and beginning a long period of social and technological commentators trying to figure out what it all meant.
To mark the event, IBM held a viewing party this evening at popular New York ping-pong spot Spin NYC with some of the engineers who helped create the supercomputer. IBM also took the opportunity to announce a collaboration with speech-technology company Nuance to bring Watson like computing and analysis to the healthcare world.
"We're moving beyond Jeopardy!" Dave Ferrucci, the principal engineer behind Watson, said at the event. "With the Watson technology, we're going to look at creating a commercial offering in the next 24 months that will help empower doctors to do higher quality decision making and diagnoses."
Trebek opened the show by talking about what he learned over the past two days, remarking on Watson's propensity to wager seemingly random amounts on Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy, and joking that Toronto is now a U.S. city, a reference to Watson's bizarre answer in the previoius night's final round. Watson pulled out to an early lead, though Jennings and Rutter soon responded. Jennings came from behind on the first round's Daily Double, pulling ahead to $7,200.
Round Two saw Watson cement its lead, but it also revealed again the computer's tendency to bet strange totals on Daily Doubles, wagering just $367 at one point. By the end of the round, though, Watson led the trio with $23,440.With final Jeopardy, it was Jennings' last chance to win, since Rutter had fallen behind. His correct question of "Who is Bram Stoker" to an answer about 19th Century novelists was accompanied by a message: "I for one welcome our computer overlords." The message was prescient. Watson also had the correct answer, though, winning it the game with $77,973 total. At Spin NYC, the bar erupted into applause at the win.
Ferrucci explained Watson's strange wagers: "They seem random to us mere mortals. What's actually going on there is that the team has trained on human betting patterns. It's considering its confidence. It's also considering where it is in the game, and how much more there is to go. It's a very complex calculation, with very precise results. We could have rounded it, but we figured just give the number."
What IBM does think Watson is good for is data analysis and aiding decision making, which is why the company's approaching the health care field first. The technology has the ability to scan and analyze data from far more sources than a human ever could in a short period of time, potentially aiding doctors in diagnosing complex but urgent conditions.
Going a step further, Ferrucci speculated that at least part of the technology might someday make its way into mobile devices, bringing Watson-like analysis directly to consumers.
"It's so much better on mobile devices to answer succinctly. That could be very helpful. But ultimately it's more of a business intelligence kind of interaction."
Despite the Jeopardy win and the promise of Watson, Ferrucci is careful to point out that his creation is still no substitute for human decision making. After all, when Watson gets a question wrong—as in the Toronto example—it gets it extremely wrong.
"With Jeopardy! these are human questions written for humans, whereas all the computer has are words. It can't rely on human context to determine things.
"I hope people stop and scratch their heads, and think about the limits of computation, and what does it mean to be intelligent," Ferrucci said. "When you deconstruct this, and look at the machine, is any part of this really understanding the question? No. We don't want computers in my opinion making value judgments about what it means to be human. Only humans can do that."
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