In 2011, to test its cognitive abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy! in the first-ever human-versus-machine matchup for the show. In a two-game, combined-point match (broadcast in three Jeopardy! episodes during February 14-16), Watson beat Brad Rutter, the highest all-time money winner on Jeopardy! and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship streak (75 days). In these episodes, Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but it had trouble responding to a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content, consuming four terabytes of disk storage. During the game, Watson was not connected to the Internet.
Meeting the Jeopardy! challenge required advancing and incorporating a variety of text mining and NLP technologies, including parsing, question classification, question decomposition, automatic source acquisition and evaluation, entity and relationship detection, logical form generation, and knowledge representation and reasoning. Winning at Jeopardy! required accurately computing confidence in answers. The questions and content are ambiguous and noisy, and none of the individual algorithms is perfect. Therefore, each component must produce a confidence in its output, and individual component confidences must be combined to compute the overall confidence of the final answer. The final confidence is used to determine whether the computer system should risk choosing to answer at all. In Jeopardy! this confidence is used to determine whether the computer will "ring in" or "buzz in" for a question. The confidence must be computed during the time the question is read and before the opportunity to buzz in. This is roughly between one and six seconds with an average around three seconds.
Watson was an excellent example for the rapid advancement of the computing technology and what it is capable of doing. Although still not as creatively/natively smart as human beings, computer systems like Watson are evolving to change the world we are living in, hopefully for the better.

Questions for Case 6.8
1. In your opinion, what are the most unique features about Watson?
2. In what other challenging games would you like to see Watson compete against humans? Why?
3. What are the similarities and differences between Watson's and humans' intelligence?