It was a sci-fi lover’s dream when IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, defeated human contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy! on Feb. 16, 2011, in the timeless battle between man and the computer. Except this computer weighed 18,000 pounds, had 90 servers, required 40 tons of air conditioning to keep it cool, and equaled the size of ten refrigerators, Jim De Piante told a packed audience in the Life Sciences Complex auditorium at an event sponsored by the School of Information Studies.

De Piante, the Executive Project Manager for IBM Research and the IBM Watson project, said that Watson was a marvel because it could understand human language and provide speedy and accurate answers to complex questions in less than three seconds.  It even had the ability to understand humor and subtle hints within questions.

To answer each question, Watson went through a two-step process, De Piante explained.  First, it read one million books or 200 million pages of data, and created additional information, called meta-information, based on the contents it analyzed.  Then, Watson offered numerous plausible answers to the question, ranked each answer according to the probability of its being correct, and gave one final solution.

The high speed Jeopardy! environment was the perfect place to test Watson’s capabilities, but to prepare for the ultimate Jeopardy! competition, IBM researchers recreated the Jeopardy environment and engaged Watson in sparring matches with former contestants.

When Watson finally played Jennings and Rutter—the best competitors in the history of Jeopardy!—it was behind at the end of the first round.  When the final buzzer sounded and the competition came to an end, however, Watson was the victor.

“The atmosphere was supercharged; it was electric,” De Piante reminisced.  “But there was almost an eerie, palpable tension as top executives, Jeopardy! staff, and competitors waited to witness a maybe—whether Watson would win.”

People who attended De Piante’s lecture had the opportunity to watch Watson play against and defeat three iSchool students by a score of 5600-4000 in a mock Jeopardy! game. One of the players was Priya Bkumar, a telecommunications and network management graduate student, who was impressed that Watson could offer specific answers to specific questions so quickly.

The students put up a valiant fight, hitting the buzzer even before they knew the answers to the questions, a tactic that De Piante said Ken Jennings himself used.  Interestingly, De Piante said, Watson never answers a question it doesn’t know.  In fact, during the match, there were a few questions that Watson would not answer because its confidence level did not reach the threshold.

Although IBM researchers had fun inventing the computer system, Watson was not created to win Jeopardy!, De Piante said.  IBM is looking into specific areas where Watson may be able to benefit humans.

In fact, on Feb. 17, only a day after Watson’s Jeopardy! victory, IBM announced plans to work with Nuance Communications, Inc. to develop and commercialize Watson’s capabilities for the healthcare industry.  Together, they will combine IBM’s Deep Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) solutions to provide physicians with quick and easily accessible information.

So whom do I root for—the computer or the human?  I root for the computer that is helping the human.

Anne Krengel is a contributing blogger for Information Space. Contact Anne at afkrenge@syr.edu or @Anne_F_K!