What's Up With WatsonWatson, come here. I need you! That's not Alexander Graham Bell speaking; that's me. I want Watson, the "Jeopardy"-winning IBM supercomputer, to come and be my brain buddy. When I just KNOW I know things — for example, what kind of art Picasso did — but only can come up with "square-ism!" Or when I am CERTAIN I can tell you what that disease is when you don't have any pigment — "Albania!" That's when I want a Watson whispering in my brain: "Duh! Try 'cubism' and 'albinism.'" It can do that, because Watson not only knows almost everything but also understands what we're getting at. It's like Google with a little mind reading thrown in. At least, that's what it looked like to me, watching Watson triumph on "Jeopardy" this week. The giant computer was built at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab (hence its name). The human Watson was the president of IBM from 1914 to 1956. For four years, the artificial intelligence team at the lab stuffed it full of 200 million pieces of information. The team also "taught" it how to look for connections among the data. So though Google can search for anything in the cyber universe that contains a certain keyword or phrase — say, "lead in toys" — Watson could understand whether I was looking for information on toys that have lead in them or companies that are leading in the toy industry. "The difference is that Google is a place that has taught YOU to understand what a machine does," says Aditya Vailaya, chief scientist for the gadget comparison website Retrevo. "You put in keywords, and YOU have to process the results." So if I know I'm looking for the top toy companies, it's up to ME to ignore Google's links to environmental organizations. But Watson doesn't just regurgitate the words we're looking for; it figures out what we MEAN by them, and it even can help us put different ideas together.
The clues were their usual, an almost obsessive mix of silly puns, weird associations and just plain arcane knowledge. A category called "Legal E's," for example, required legal terms that started with the letter E. Watson got that. And it got a lot of slang. And it responded correctly to an entire category devoted to hedgehogs (which is just what we need from the world's most advanced computer). Its two human competitors looked pretty good, considering they were up against what industry insiders believe is a $1 billion to $2 billion machine. Brad Rutter, a contestant who made $3.2 million on "Jeopardy" and seems to have used it to relocate to LA and lose weight, was actually tied with Watson at one point. Ken Jennings, famous (at least in a "Jeopardy" kind of way) for once winning 74 "Jeopardy" games in a row, looked even better because he scrawled on his board at the end, after losing, "I for one welcome our new computer overlords." Gracious and funny. And that, in fact, remains humanity's one saving grace. Watson can put the pieces together. It can infer; it can help us out. It soon may be able to give a doctor who inputs a list of symptoms a probable diagnosis. And my personal hope is that Watson eventually will replace the part of our brains that disappears when we desperately are trying to think of a certain actor's name and all we can do is go, "The one who isn't Ben Affleck! Boston! Movie together! Didn't date J.Lo!" (Don't tear your hair out. It's Matt Damon.) But what it doesn't seem ready to make is a little joke when it's beaten. And it can't lose weight or grow a beard. It's just another machine. Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now" and "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM
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