Wednesday, September 21, 2016

IBM's Watson comes of age

When IBM decided to build a computer system to challenge Gary Kasparov to a chess match they knew it would be a hard challenge. Eventually, IBM's Deep Blue won. Then people thought: "Amazing! What can Deep Blue do now?" It turned out, not much really. Deep Blue could only play chess and some people argued only against Kasparov. IBM learnt from this and when they set themselves a new challenge they wanted to create something that would be useful afterwards. The IBM Jeopardy Challenge created an AI that could use vast amounts of human knowledge and answer difficult and interesting questions. Watson is now being used to help cancer specialists make better diagnoses, it's helped design a dress and it's helped create a movie trailer. In each of these cases it "augments" human intelligence rather than replace it. Watch the YouTube clip below for more.

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