Thursday, January 13, 2011

Can a Machine win at Jeopardy?

So it turns out that on Valentines day this year that Watson, a computer system designed by IBM will be taking part as a contestant in a special televised edition of Jeopardy during which Watson will compete against two Jeopardy champions.

IBM has some very excited videos and website. I think the video I've embedded below is a great teaser video. It took me a while to find their slightly calmer FAQ that reveals more about the background of Watson than is in most of videos, including the open source framework that is Watson's principal infrastructure for assembling, scaling-out and deploying its analytic components. This special Jeopardy challenge event takes place just three weeks into the Artificial Intelligence course I'm teaching this semester and you can bet I'll spend a week on it and some of the open source components behind it!

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