IBM will pit one of its computers against past champions of the "Jeopardy!" quiz show, more than a decade after another IBM machine defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.
Watson, as the computer is called after IBM founder Thomas Watson, will square off against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a contest scheduled to air Feb. 14, said IBM researcher Dave Ferrucci. Jennings has the longest win streak in the show's history, and Rutter won more money than any other player.
"It's going to be a close game," said Ferrucci, an artificial intelligence expert who has headed the Watson project. "These guys are really good. I'm going to have to breathe deeply and count to 10 a lot."
The three-contestant competition, the show's usual number, will last three days and the winner will receive $1 million. The shows will be broadcast from IBM's lab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and air during the regular "Jeopardy!" time slot.
The project builds on IBM's work in the field of artificial intelligence, including the Deep Blue supercomputer that defeated world champion Kasparov in a 1997 match.
Its main task for the "Jeopardy!" challenge: Make computers understand questions in natural language, as opposed to the keyword searches common on Google. While computers can easily search databases, they have problems understanding context, innuendo and other subtleties common in most information, Ferrucci said.
"The Holy Grail here is to create a technology that can understand what you're asking, the way you're asking it," he said. "People want to do more with all the content we have."
For the "Jeopardy!" competition, Watson will receive each question through a typed entry at the same time host Alex Trebek reads the queries to Jennings and Rutter. The computer will scan a custom-made database for answers and then calculate its degree of confidence in an answer. If the confidence level exceeds a certain threshold, it will buzz and speak the answer out loud.
