Posted on Tuesday, April 28 2009 @ 0:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
IBM announced it plans to let a computer program compete against humans in Jeopardy!, a popular TV quiz show. The AI will receive questions as electronic text and will respond with a synthesized voice. The IBM computer will not be connected to the Internet, but will formulate its answers based on knowledge it has processed and indexed before the show.
The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking “grand challenges” like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval.
Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the “Jeopardy!” producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show’s host, Alex Trebek.
The computer will respond with a synthesized voice to answer questions and to choose follow-up categories. I.B.M. researchers said they planned to move a Blue Gene supercomputer to Los Angeles for the contest. To approximate the dimensions of the challenge faced by the human contestants, the computer will not be connected to the Internet, but will make its answers based on text that it has “read,” or processed and indexed, before the show.
More info
at NY Times.
