Man vs. Machine
Posted on: May 1, 2011
On Febuary 11th, 2011, Alex Trebek hosted the first ever competition between man and machine. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Jeopardy’s two greatest champions, played against Watson, An Artificial Intelligence Computer System, in Jeapordy. Watson was named after IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson. Watson had access to limitless information as long as it was entered into its system. It can access it at any time but however, it still cannot “learn” new information by its own capability. The IBM machine was able to take words and match them up to find answers to questions. Throughout the game, the computer did the calculations and searched through documents faster than humans, but it did have trouble understanding some of the questions that were worded differently unlike the humans. In the end, the Watson won. I think this competition shows how far technology has advanced. It also shows the potential computers have to evolve even more and create very complex machines. It is also kind of scary to think that a computer is smarter than a man and that they could potentially take over the world.
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