There's Nothing Elementary About IBM's Remarkable Watson

Do you think you have what it takes to beat a machine in a trivia battle? Step right up then and take your best shot. But, be prepared to walk a mile in chess master Garry Kasparov's shoes. He, too, was famously bested in 1997 by Deep Blue (pictured), another IBM silicon brainiac, and you should steel yourself to meet the same fate.

Say hello to Watson. Named not for Sherlock Holmes' clue-sniffing sidekick but rather for IBM pioneer and early company president Thomas J. Watson, the latest artificial intelligence initiative by the computing giant has some fun upcoming plans that involve one of America's favorite game shows. Fun and games aside, as The New York Times reports, Watson additionally represents IBM's dead-serious approach to expanding the envelope of possibility in the arena of information querying and results retrieval.

As the Times reports, Watson goes beyond the results offered by conventional search engines, which suggest possible best-fit answers to a given inquiry by offering the correct answer, often to very complex and less-than-straightforward questions. Engineers working at IBM's DeepQA project, which gives rise to Watson, chose the construct of the game show Jeopardy as their guiding framework, largely because most thought the task to be unreachable. Surely, the consideration of a convoluted question, in the form of a riddle, perhaps containing a pun or turn of phrase, would require the sort of processing that only the human brain is capable of successfully handling.

Watson, reportedly, has shattered this assumption, and as early as this fall, the device will be pitted against former Jeopardy champion players in televised game play. The project has been in the works for three years according to the IBM website, and with Watson we're advancing ever closer to where computers may "deliver precise, meaningful responses, and synthesize, integrate and rapidly reason over the breadth of human knowledge as it is most rapidly and naturally produced — in natural language text" as the site characterizes their approach to project goals.

Photo by James the photographer via Wikimedia Commons.