Watson AI Fails to Destroy Humans in First Round of Jeopardy

Humans fight on as IBM's artificial intelligence ends its first day of Jeopardy competition

2 min read

Watson AI Fails to Destroy Humans in First Round of Jeopardy

UPDATE: See who prevailed -- man or machine? -- in the third and final round!

You can relax: so far, we humans aren't completely redundant, as IBM's Watson artificial intelligence system managed to not answer every single question instantly and correctly in the first round of a three day Jeopardy exhibition match with past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

After round one (which was as far as today's show got), Watson was tied with Brad for first with $5000, and Ken Jennings was in third with $2000. It's worth mentioning that Watson led for most of the round, with a few incorrect questions setting it back significantly towards the end. Watson definitely showed more 'common sense' than I was expecting, but it still seemed burdened with a fair amount of the 'so smart it's kinda dumb' that computers are known for. It definitely didn't get everything right, displaying a significant number of low-certainty answers (below its buzzing threshold) as well as buzzing in with several answers that seemed pretty far off. It also managed to give an incorrect answer to a question that Ken had incorrectly answered with the same answer moments before, which is a bug that I bet is getting resolved as we speak.

While I was honestly hoping that Watson would do slightly better, I'm relieved that it at least ended up tied for first. Irrespective of expectations, I feel like Watson turned in an impressive performance, and I think that's one of the most important aspects of this exhibition... In my experience, the overall perception that the general public has of the current state of robotics and artificial intelligence is some mix of Roomba, the Terminator, and Commander Data, which is (to put it mildly) somewhat inaccurate and unrealistic. So, it's good to see a state-of-the-art AI system put on a credible public performance, complete with some fallability to keep us feeling comfortably in control.

The next segment (featuring the the second round plus Final Jeopardy) airs on ABC tonight, with the final match on Wednesday.

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