Elementary, my dear Watson - IBM's Jeopardy! game challenge

Tony Austin
Monday, 27 April 2009 11:44

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft Office 365

After browsing the YouTube movie catalog, I chose to download an old sci-fi classic that I'd never watched before. It was released in 1950 after two years in the making with the title Destination Moon.

For the time, I reckon it's a reasonable attempt to present various aspects space travel with some degree of realism -- and the makers felt no need to resort to any space monsters -- but it didn't get much acclaim: read a review here (or here).

Early on, in a brief passage covering the design and engineering of the atomic-powered steam rocket, there's a fleeting glimpse of a primitive table-sized computing machine made up of of rotating rods and cogs.

Most of the calculations were still being done with slide rules in those days. Then there were just a handful of early valve-driven digital computers around, and production use of transistors was still a decade or more away.

Let's now take a quick jump forward to year 2009, where technology has moved on a tad since the making of Destination Moon.

At the leading edge we find IBM Research division, again, this time announcing that they're going to mount a computer challenge against humans in the Jeopardy! television game show.

"What we're doing," says IBM's John Kelly, Senior VP and Director of Research, "is creating here a system that will be able to applied to all sorts of applications in the world, and essentially cut the time to find answers to very difficult problems." ... Now that's something.

The Jeopardy! challenge is going to be fascinating to follow, considering all the nuances of spoken language that have to be catered for (as pointed out in this New York Times article).