Watching Watson

Didn't think I'd ever write about the game show Jeopardy but...Well, never thought that Jeopardy would become "must see tv".

Tonight on Jeopardy (and for the next three episodes), the two most successful contestants in the shows history will be competing against an IBM computer named Watson (in case you missed it, tonight was a draw).

Like most people (I would assume), my gut instinct was to root for the two human contestants against their very rectangular opponent However, having thought about it a bit, I've decided that I have to root for the machine. Here's why:

First of all, the victory of a human over a tool designed by humans, isn't really something that humanity should be celebrating. Certainly, the John Henry myth is a heroic and sad one, but would you for even a moment prefer to rely on a single giant to dig tunnels or would you rather see tunnels dug by machines? A victory over a tool might be fantastic for the giant performing the feat. But for the rest of mankind, it just means we're stuck with an inferior tool. Being the tool using species, we should never be happy about that.

And that's essentially what this Watson thing is: It is a tool. Or more accurately, it's a step on the road of the evolution of a tool. It's a small step towards creating a cognizant machine.

Which leads me to my second point: If Watson does in fact defeat its human opponents, consider what an awesome accomplishment this is for the many, many men and women that worked to design it? One of the major flaws with computers is that there language is so profoundly rigid. It operates under extremely precise parameters.

For example, you could give a 12 year old an instruction along the lines of "Find out everything you can about space exploration" and send him on his way. Those instructions given to a computer would be utterly worthless; they'd be far to vague for it to even begin. If it managed to return anything at all, it'd be an endless stream of mostly useless data.

What the men and women who designed Watson have done is therefore spectacular: They've created a machine that can respond to normal human questions (which are almost always somewhat vague). Furthermore, it's a machine that can purportedly untangle the awesome intricacies of language itself to understand what data is in fact pertinent (for example a question like "Who ran for President in 2008?" has a completely different context than "Who ran in the marathon?").

So, I'm rooting for humanity in the form of our champion: Watson.