IBM’s Watson, king of the Jeopardy game, has proven the obvious. On the final day of the game it defeated all time best of the Jeopardy (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter ), winning $77,973. Credit for this victory goes to IBM, Dr. David Ferruchi and his teams. This is déjà vu of IBM’s Deep Blue Supercomputer match with the reigning World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov (May 1997).

“Deep Blue Supercomputer” is passé in front of IBM’s new innovation. Watson is context aware and artificially intelligent. It can resolve the context and ambiguity of English text; navigate through Terabytes of memory and look for right results.

Did I write “look for right result”, Oh! I am sorry it is a bad phrase; Watson is claimed to cognate the human brain’s cognitive process by its statistical experiences over “unstructured and structured” knowledge base. All is done under 3 seconds using ninety “IBM POWER 750” servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage.  Its microprocessors are written for the software stack to address that need of specific applications (like Jeopardy).

Powerful hardware is combined with amazing algorithms to give high confidence answers.  Capitalist world will not ignore this golden goose. But for a general TV viewer and journalist “The Technological Apocalypse” is approaching; some are concerned about (even) the skilled jobs, like financial analysis, medical diagnostics, and technical support going Watson’s way.

Watson is not an invention, it is an innovation

Let me reconfirm, Watson is here to assist you; not to take over your jobs. A program which can answer “Toronto”  in the category of “U.S. Cities”, and is unable to judge the thread between Rocky 1, 2 and 3, can repeat the wrong answers of its competitors and can only play jeopardy; is not going to replace you, yet (longer yet). Knowledge and Questions are both created by humans and Watson does what he is told to do.

Breath easy, relax and recite this mantra 5 times “Watson is not an invention, it is an innovation”. Watson is to language semantics what iPhone was to mobiles. Watson brought various concepts of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Language Processing under one patched umbrella. To achieve what Watson just did has to be an effort of Machine learning experts, speech/knowledge representation/ information retrieval/ rule engine  engineers, Linguists, Ontologists, media artists, programmers and tons more. Scope of the Watson in confined only to a single sentence, it is the scale which deserves a standing ovation.

Watson Family

For the people in the domains of Language Semantics or Artificial Intelligence Watson is an “engineering marvel”, “modeling genius” and “marketing success”. It is the result of 100’s millions $ spend over four years. IBM has the budget for this and others don’t, so IBM can win jeopardy.  That said, it’s the winner which counts, not the others.

Keeping aside, the amazing publicity for IBM, and the top of the chart rating for Jeopardy; Watson is a big success for the whole Language Processing fraternity, we have struggled for years to make people understand the difference between “Google and Semantic” search. I am glad world is trying to understand (by itself) “How and What Watson just did?” Venture capitalists are bubbling up the Web 2.0; I believe Watson phenomenon will attract them to the technology which is the future of mankind.

Watson & the Future

Watson is fine tuned to play the game of Jeopardy; it understands the rules of the game.  It can take risks. But Watson is no thinking machine, it is a specialized machine to play jeopardy, it can resolve the context of small sentence or facts and then formulate an answer (using the deep/fast knowledge base).

In the practical world, Watson runs on very thin line. Its humongous infrastructure cannot be supported by mega businesses of today. It is fit for worldwide “repository/ service/ cloud” of question and answering. But real world problems/solutions are not one liner semantics. They are complex & infested with human traits of culture, intelligence, voice, taste, touch, vision, smell and emotions.

As a search engine Watson, stands face to face with Google search. Which is kind of dumb, fast, popular and a market leader. Making dent in the search engine market is not an option for Watson; it’s too expensive and slow for this area.

I am sure the creators of Watson have some interesting business proposition in mind. Those who ride an elephant have to feed him too.

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