Watson more intelligent than humans?
Submitted by David Smith on February 23, 2011 - 10:56am
The news created quite a flutter. Computers are becoming more intelligent than humans, asked many with amazement.
Watson had an upper hand with all the information in its memory
But reports coming out now, exhibit that Watson was just a part of an experiment. The designers had filled the computer with huge amounts of information, to see if it can beat human contestants using this information.
Jeopardy was considered as a good testing platform as it has a structured format, much different than the uncertainties of the real world.
Watson has another advantage too. It was directly linked to the buzzer. So when the other contestants had to spend almost quarter of a second to press that button, Watson did it almost instantly as it didn’t had to use hands to press the button.
Well, sometimes quarter of a second also matters.
Watson had other advantages too
Watson had another advantage too. The human competitors had to wait for the host, Alec Trebek to finish reading the ‘answer’, Watson did it instantly which gave it some extra time to sift through its huge memory and select the right answer.
The other competitors had to press the buzzer for defeating the machine, which had split second electronic reflexes.
Wall Street Journal described the Watson in following words, “It’s the size of 10 refrigerators, has access to the equivalent of 200 million pages of information....... is powered by 10 racks of IBM servers running the Linux operating system. It’s not connected to the internet but has digested encyclopaedias, dictionaries, books, news, movie scripts and more.”
With all this information stored in Watson, we can say that Watson cheated.
