IBM Developing Computing System to Challenge Humans on America's Favorite Quiz Show, Jeopardy!

IBM Developing Computing System to Challenge Humans on America's Favorite Quiz Show, Jeopardy!

Scientific Grand Challenge Expected to Demonstrate Ability to Determine Precise Answers to Complex Questions at Record Speeds

ARMONK, N.Y. and CULVER CITY, Calif., April 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM today unveiled details of an advanced computing system that will be able to compete with humans on Jeopardy!, America's favorite quiz show. Additionally, officials from Jeopardy! announced plans to produce a human vs. machine competition on the renowned show.

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For nearly two years, IBM scientists have been working on a highly advanced Question Answering (QA) system, codenamed "Watson." The scientists believe that the computing system will be able to understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on Jeopardy!

Produced by Sony Pictures Television and distributed by CBS Television Distribution, Jeopardy! is a game demanding knowledge and quick recall, covering a broad range of topics, such as history, literature, politics, film, pop culture, and science. It poses a grand challenge for a computing system due to the variety of subject matter, the speed at which contestants must provide accurate responses, and because the clues given to contestants involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities at which humans excel and computers traditionally do not.

Watson will incorporate massively parallel analytical capabilities and, just like human competitors, Watson will not be connected to the Internet or have any other outside assistance.

"The essence of making decisions is recognizing patterns in vast amounts of data, sorting through choices and options, and responding quickly and accurately," said Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. "Watson is a compelling example of how the planet - companies, industries, cities - is becoming smarter. With advanced computing power and deep analytics, we can infuse business and societal systems with intelligence. This project is the latest example of IBM's longstanding commitment to fundamental research and to overcoming 'grand challenges' in science and technology."

"Jeopardy! is a world-renowned Sony property, and the gold standard for savvy game players everywhere. It is the perfect platform on which IBM can demonstrate its computing power," said Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation. "Winning on Jeopardy! is a challenge that audiences embrace every night in record numbers, and we are delighted to be able to expand the form and the possibilities through this exciting new project."

From its precedent-setting taping on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show to its top-ranking mobile games, Jeopardy! is always on the cutting edge of new technology and available to audiences anytime, anywhere and on any screen. The first syndicated show to be produced in high-definition and the winner of 28 Emmy awards since its debut in 1984, Jeopardy! was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most awards won by a TV Game Show. The series is the #1-rated quiz show in syndication with more than 10 million daily viewers. Jeopardy! is produced by Sony Pictures Television, a Sony Pictures Entertainment Company. It is distributed domestically and internationally by CBS Television Distribution, a unit of CBS Corp.

The research underlying Watson is expected to elevate computer intelligence and human-to-computer communication to unprecedented levels. IBM intends to apply the unique technological capabilities being developed for Watson to help clients across a wide variety of industries answer business questions quickly and accurately.

About Jeopardy!
For more information about Jeopardy!, visit www.Jeopardy.com
For photos and art work of Jeopardy!, visit www.cbspressexpress.com

About IBM
For more information about IBM, visit www.IBM.com

Addendum: About IBM's Watson System

Watson will be designed to deftly handle semantics - the meanings behind words - which will enable it to answer questions that require the identification of relevant and irrelevant content, the interpretation of ambiguous expression and puns, the decomposition of questions into sub-questions, and the logical synthesis of final answers. In addition, Watson will compute a statistical confidence in the responses it provides. Watson will be designed to do all of this in a matter of seconds, which will enable it to compete against humans, who have the ability to know what they know in less than a second.

IBM's effort to create Watson is aimed at exploring the future of business intelligence, analytics and information management, so that the company can continue to provide its clients with cutting-edge capabilities for finding the information they need from the mountains of data they produce.

In 1997, an IBM computer called Deep Blue defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a famous battle of human versus machine. To compete at chess, IBM built an extremely fast computer that could calculate 200 million chess moves per second based on a fixed problem. IBM's Watson system, on the other hand, is seeking to solve an open-ended problem that requires an entirely new approach - mainly through dynamic, intelligent software - to even come close to competing with the human mind. Despite their massive computational capabilities, today's computers cannot consistently analyze and comprehend sentences, much less understand cryptic clues and find answers in the same way the human brain can.

Unlike conventional computing technologies designed to return documents containing the user's keywords or semantic entities, Watson is expected to leap ahead to interpret the user's query as a true question and to determine precisely what the user is asking for. Watson uses massively parallel processing to simultaneously and instantly understand complex questions - questions that require the system to consider huge volumes and varieties of natural language text to gather and then deeply analyze and score supporting or refuting evidence. The system then decides how confident it is in the answer. This approach marries advanced machine learning and statistical techniques with the latest in natural language processing to result in human-like precision and speed, huge breadth and accurate confidence determination.

"The challenge is to build a system that, unlike systems before it, can rival the human mind's ability to determine precise answers to natural language questions and to compute accurate confidences in the answers," said Dr. David Ferrucci, leader of the IBM Watson project team. "This confidence processing ability is key. It greatly distinguishes the IBM approach from conventional search, and is critical to implementing useful business applications of Question Answering."

"Progress on the underlying QA technologies enabling Watson will be important in the quest to understand and build 'intelligent computing systems' capable of cooperating with humans in language-related tasks previously out of reach for computers," added Dr. Ferrucci.

In 2008, IBM and Carnegie Mellon University, working with other universities, pioneered the Open Advancement of Question Answering (OAQA) initiative. OAQA aims to provide an architectural and methodological foundation for accelerating research collaboration in automatic question answering. IBM intends to invite universities to collaborate on Watson and other driving challenge problems to help demonstrate how a wide range of independently developed algorithms can be integrated and generalized.

CONTACT:
Michael Loughran
IBM
mloughra@us.ibm.com
(O) 914.945.1613
(C) 914.443.9816

Jeff Ritter
Jeopardy!
Jeff_Ritter@spe.sony.com
(O) 310.244.6514

Video: http://news.prnewswire.com/viewrelease.aspx?STORY=MzI=
Source: IBM Corporation

CONTACT: Michael Loughran, IBM, mloughra@us.ibm.com, (O)
+1-914-945-1613, (C) +1-914-443-9816, or Jeff Ritter, Jeopardy!,
Jeff_Ritter@spe.sony.com, (O) +1-310-244-6514

Web Site: http://www.ibm.com/

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