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IBM's Watson computer soundly defeated the two highest-rated Jeopardy former champions earlier this year, signifying the dawn of a new age of computer-assisted decision-making. It was also a massive marketing coup for IBM and Jeopardy. Stephen Baker's "Final Jeopardy" reports on how Watson came to this latest achievement, along with hints of what comes next.
Originally computers were limited to rapidly processing data according to predefined rules, first for individual questions (eg. military applications), then larger and larger batches of commercial data, and eventually immediate 'real-time' response. Next came IBM's 'Deep Blue' defeat of the reigning 1997 chess champion, Garry Kasperov, demonstrating its ability to analyze millions of scenarios/second to select the moves most likely to win - an impressive new mathematical achievement. Winning Jeopardy, however, required the computer to analyze English natural-language words and phrases, despite confusing puns, idioms, allusions, double-meanings, trick questions, and the importance of syntax, and then select the most likely correct answer from a giant electronic database containing Project Gutenberg (33,000 highly rated e-books), dictionaries, taxonomies, thesauri, encyclopedias, news articles, book abstracts, famous works of music and art, etc., without an Internet connection - all within a maximum of five seconds. Watson also had to determine optimal betting strategies, taking into account current point rankings, as well as the potential earnings and betting opportunities remaining.
David Ferrucci, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert within IBM was selected to lead its Jeopardy effort.Read more ›
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Stephen Baker's account of the creation and teaching of IBM's Watson computer, preparing it for the climactic Jeopardy contest with the two top living human Jeopardy champions, is a delight to read AND a highly informative overview of artificial intelligence and the role computers will play in our lives from here on out. You get to know and appreciate the complex, talented characters of the story at IBM and in Hollywood. The growing sense of drama makes the book un-put-downable. Will IBM's engineers prepare Watson to figure out the pun-filled, playful and quirky categories of Jeopardy? Will the Hollywood execs agree to fair terms of engagement? And, most intriguingly, who will win the final showdown?
I love what Baker's publisher has done with the Kindle version of this book - making the first 11 chapters available well before the showdown Jeopardy match airs on Feb. 14-15-16. After the actual match took place, in great secrecy, Baker wrote the final chapter of his book, which will arrive as a Kindle download the day after the final match, when the hardcover will also be available, with all the chapters. This is a fantastic use of e-book technology, so bravo to Houghton Mifflin for such a clever and Kindle-friendly innovation.
[...]
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I think I am able to write a review of this from a somewhat unique perspective. Like the other amazon reviewers except for the one who read an advanced copy with the final chapter left out,I saw the show a few days before I could read the book as its publication was delayed until the three day taped telecast aired. I was born in 1947 and grew up with IBM doing my first computer program in Fortran (1965)using an IBM 7090 machine at the Brookhaven National Laboratory where I was taking a summer course after graduating from high school. The 7090 was a big computer powerful for the time (laughable by today's standard is had something like 64k memory). It was the forerunner for the IBM 360s which also dominated the business computing market when they came out.
I am also a big fan of Jeopardy having watched almost all of Ken Jennings 75 games on the show. I also saw his match against Brad Rutter and I read his book "Brainiac". Also I am a statistician and worked on expert systems in the mid 1980s. At that time I also read some of the AI literature and found the pragmatic expert system approach to be to my liking and the most fruitful approach to machine intelligence or learning. This puts me in line with David Ferucci's pragmatic approach to AI. Statistics played a big role in the development of Watson and the use of an algorithm on confidence (in a probabilistic sense) seems very appealing to me. IBM made Watson behave somewhat like the humans by not allowing him to buzz in unless his confidence on an answer reached a particular threshold. That was also a disadvantage because he could never gamble on a guess while the humans could and perhaps on some occasions should.Read more ›
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I got this book because I am intrigued with Jeopardy (my best friend was a participant in the show before) and I love computers. When I first heard about Watson, I was very interested in what they were doing. I thought this book would be the perfect source to learn more.
It is written fantastically and is fun to read, but it does not go into the technology too much, which is what I was looking for. Still, I enjoyed reading and learning. I had no idea how many problems there were with both the technology and the business aspect of the program. The book goes into the areas of logic and AI as well, and gives some history of IBM and its chess-playing computer of the past.
Anyone who's looking for a nice, easy read should take a look at this book. Techies: It probably won't fill your needs in terms of describing the technology, but it's still fun to read. There isn't any other source as complete as this on Watson. Take a look!
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This item: Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
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