IBM Program And Supercomputer To Take On 'Jeopardy'

IBM wants to replicate its success they had with Deep Blue in defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov by creating a program to conquer the popular TV quiz game show “Jeopardy”.

IBM is planning to announce today about this new program to compete against “Jeopardy” contestants. It will probably be similar like its highly successful “Deep Blue” super computer but have to face entirely different challenges. IBM developed a chess-playing program and ran it in their supercomputer Deep Blue, which went on to defeat the then world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

Some of the challenges the new program faces are it should be able make comparisons and interpretations of different statements it is given and also has to respond quickly with competing humans in the contest.

IBM’s team leader for this research, David A. Ferrucci, an artificial intelligence researcher told New York Times that it still has a long way to go to fully develop this new program.

He said the team is not trying to create a thinking machine but rather a new class of program that can “understand human questions and respond to them correctly”.

Despite significant advances in artificial intelligence research, we are yet to develop a machine that can understand the language and interact with humans fluently.

IBM has been working on this project for the past three years and has 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval.

In the proposed contest between the IBM computer and the competitors, Jeopardy producers will host the competition. To make it easy for the computer, the producers will give the questions in the form of text and its competitors will see the questions in text as well as hear the questions from the host, Alex Trebak.

The competition will be done in real-time, no internet connection will be allowed for the proposed IBM supercomputer “Blue Gene”. It will base its answers from the knowledge base it acquires prior to the show.

The Jeopardy producers and IBM haven’t announced the date of this competition but said they both are working on it. There is a possibility that they may bring in Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy contestant who won a record 74 times and collected $2.52 million in 2004.

In a demo witnessed by the New York Times, IBM showed a brief glimpse of the program. They found the computer did well in some areas but did poorly in others.

Will “Blue Gene” succeed like “Deep Blue”?