Machines winning television contests
Jeopardy! This is an American television contest with questions and answers on many different topics. With a definition, contestants must guess what the word, the person, the thing, the place or whatever is, but definitions include many sets of words and traps. It is many years that they give, and the participants demonstrate great knowledge. It is something similar to Know and Win in Spain.
On 14 and 15 February, two special sessions were scheduled: instead of three normal participants, one machine was and the other two best competitors in history. The goal is to see if the machine is able to beat the best human beings in this competition. Machine, computer manufactured by IBM, Watson.
Watson had no internet connection, he had to have all the necessary information. They did not put voice knowledge on him. The questions were passed to Watson in digital text format, the presenter told the other contestants at the same time. As the fastest hitting the Answer button wins, Watson also had to activate a mechanical finger when he was ready to respond. He answered verbally. Playing in these conditions, and even though in some questions he answered weird things, Watson was very successful, even difficult questions and with word games, and gave a good beating to others: He won $77,147, while humans won 24,000 and 21,600.
Artificial intelligence?
In 1997 another IBM machine, Deep Blue, won world champion Gary Kasparov in chess. Playing chess requires intelligence and Jeopardy! Understand the language to work in . Have they overcome us in the two areas that characterize human beings, intelligence and language?
No, at the moment we can be calm. The techniques used in both cases can be considered very simple against the complexity of the thought process of the human brain. Deep Blue, basically, in the tree of all possible plays and counterparts, drastically decreased with its great computational capacity, and only in each case opted for the path that most likely to win offered.
Watson's techniques are relatively simple. Despite having successful many answers, he sometimes said very rare things that he doesn't really "understand" language. They say they use DeepQA technology, ultimately an advanced QA (Question Answering). These techniques make a brief analysis of the question using the NLP (Natural Language Processing), to later search for the keywords of the same in a text base, doing IR (Information Search), if desired, with synonym, etc. and finally, translate in all the results the nearest and likely word that corresponds to the questionnaire. On the other hand, it is true that some of the word games have been successful, so it must be recognized that they have improved the usual techniques.
But the key to their success, like that of Deep Blue, is in computational capacity. Watson has 2880 processor cores giving it a speed of 80 Teraflops and 15 Terabytes of RAM. This allows you to store a lot of information, search for information quickly and perform calculations quickly.
Although machines are far from the true intelligence of a person, we have seen that in specific tasks (chess, TV quizzes...) they may be able to overcome man through simplified techniques and with the help of a great computational capacity. Some say that by 2050 a robot football team will be held capable of winning a selection of the best in the world. Then it will be the end of the world... Or maybe people lose interest in football, and money and time will be used in more important things!
And while true artificial intelligence has not been achieved, Jeopardy! As one of the contestants did, honoring Homer Simpson, I too, through these pages, want to welcome our machines again boss and let them know that I am your most humble and faithful servant. Just in case...
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