It’s a modern-day John Henry story.
For those unfamiliar with the folktale, John Henry was a big, tough, steel-drivin’ son of a gun who worked on the railroad (all the livelong day).
He was the best, but when the railroad owner hired a steam engine to replace his workers, Henry challenges the owner to a contest.
Henry bet he could drive more railroad spikes into the ground faster than the steam engine.
As the folklore goes, Henry beat the machine — but, unfortunately, died as he was victorious.
Today wraps up the “Jeopardy!” IBM Challenge.
A three-day tournament pitting two of the greatest “Jeopardy!” players — 74-day champion Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the highest monetary winner in “Jeopardy!” history — against a new challenger named Watson.
Watson is an artificial intelligence program developed by IBM and designed to answer questions posed in natural language.
However, it’s more complicated than it sounds.
Watson isn’t connected to the Internet. He can’t simply Google the correct answer.
Instead, Watson comprises 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 terabytes (or 16,000 gigabytes) of RAM — most low-end laptops come equipped with about two gigabytes of RAM.
While Watson can’t see or hear anything, he competes on “Jeopardy!” by having the questions fed to him in a text file at the same time host Alex Trebek reads the question aloud to the human players.
Watson then breaks down and analyzes the question, processes thousands of algorithms and picks its top answer before buzzing in.
All in under two seconds.
Basically, it’s thinking.
The interesting thing about “Jeopardy!” questions is they are rather “punny.”
What makes Watson’s technology so impressive is it is frequently able to decipher the puns and still come up with the correct answer.
Puns aside, he also has to be able to fully understand the English language.
Essentially, Watson’s engineers had to “teach” Watson the meaning of words.
For example, you could say a politician runs for office — or you could say a sprinter runs a race.
The same word, “runs,” has two different meanings, so the engineers had to make Watson clever enough to decipher the meaning of the word.
Unfortunately, Watson can’t always get it right.
In practice rounds, Watson didn’t just miss questions — it was nowhere close.
One clue began with, “This non-dairy substance…” and Watson’s response was, “milk.”
Also, on Monday’s show, Jennings rang in to a clue and answered “1920s,” but was incorrect.
However, Watson also came up with “1920s” as his top answer and proceeded to ring in after Jennings to also miss the question.
The tournament is taking place in the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
The actual Watson sits in this facility, next door to the auditorium hosting “Jeopardy!”
Watson fills an entire room surrounded by two enormous refrigerating units to keep it cool.
Similar to how computers used to fill an entire room in the 1950s but were considerably less powerful than modern-day cell phones, it blows my mind to consider that in less than 50 years, people will be able to hold the computing power of Watson in their hands.
Although the special spans three days, only two full games of “Jeopardy!,” which includes Jeopardy!, Double Jeopardy! and Final Jeopardy!, will be played with segments of Watson’s origin and development intertwined within.
After the first two days, one full game of “Jeopardy!” has been played.
The results after the first two shows (or one full game of “Jeopardy!”) are Jennings at $4,800, Rutter at $10,400 and Watson with a commanding lead of $35,734.
These totals will be added to today’s final round with the winner taking home $1 million.
The type of computing power out there is scary.
Let’s just hope Watson sticks to answering “Jeopardy!” questions and isn’t the beginning of a real-life Skynet.
Adam Arinder is a 21-year-old communication studies senior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_aarinder.
 
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Contact Adam Arinder at [email protected]