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engadget.com...]
Today IBM and Jeopardy offered a quick teaser of that match, with the three contestants knocking out three categories at lightning speed. Not a single question was answered wrongly, and at the end of the match Watson, who answers questions with a cold computer voice, telegraphing his certainty with simple color changes on his "avatar," was ahead with $4,400, Ken had $3,400, and Brad had $1,200.
For people not familiar with Watson, this is a huge AI milestone, the first steps toward skynet :)
Compare this to IBM's Deep Blue chess program, which was simply solving math problems and analyzing all possible future moves on a finite grid. Computers playing humans now is much like humans playing tic-tac-toe with a chicken, the computer will always win (so will the chicken) assuming the program doesn't have any bugs.
Watson on the other hand, reads the question posed by Jeopardy, fishes out the semantics, nuances and punny meanings, and comes up with an answer in 3 seconds. Not only that, it comes up with the 3 best answers and ranks them based on confidence level and offers the top scoring result.
This is literally the coolest AI milestone ever.
I will be glued to my seat in front of the TV when this airs in February.
