My son Arjun has been a big Jeopardy fan and a tech geek. So, a highlight in his list of things he is looking forward to is IBM's Watson supercomputer playing in the Jeopardy quiz show on US television starting today on a 3 day run.
If you haven't heard of Jeopardy, it is a quiz show that has been running for decades in US television where usually there are 3 human contestants. Subjects used for the quiz could be anything one can imagine and often involves pun, humor and other language traits. Today, tomorrow and the day after while there will be two human contestants (who are formidable winners in the years past), third place is being taken up by the super computer designed by IBM called Watson. There are a lot of write-ups and news clips on the net about this heavily promoted, highly anticipated show. I am listing just a couple of links here:
Please do read them. While on the outside it is designed to be very simple, easy to understand on the show as just a computer taking the place of 1 of the 3 contestants, the audacity of this effort is mind-boggling if you are familiar with natural language processing challenges in Computer Science. In 1997 a previous IBM supercomputer called "Deep Blue" played chess with Grand Master Garry Kasparov and beat him. While it was an amazing feat, chess is much more precise and lends itself well to coding than a challenge like competing against human beings on a quiz show like Jeopardy with full fledged natural language processing capability. Though this proof of concept is via a quiz show, you can immediately see how this could be useful in so many facets of human life. Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers, running Linux. It uses 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores, etc. Will see how it fares this week. :-)
Hopefully this will excite a lot of new kids and inspire them to get into Computer Science..! :-)
-sundar.
