IBM's Watson edges Harvard students in 'Jeopardy' quiz

31.10.2011
IBM's Watson supercomputer eked out a victory in a "Jeopardy" quiz-show battle with a trio of Harvard Business School students on Monday, pulling out the win with a higher wager on the Final Jeopardy clue that ends every game.

Both Watson and the HBS students got the final answer, Mount Rushmore, correct, but Watson bet more of its winnings and ended up with US$56,331 to HBS's $42,399. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management also played but couldn't find its rhythm during the contest, and ended up with just $100. No actual money was at stake.

Watson marries an array of software for natural-language processing and other tasks with a hardware cluster containing 2,880 Power processor cores, and finds answers to "Jeopardy" questions from a massive content archive prepared by IBM.

The students didn't compete against Watson head-to-head, however. IBM had Watson answer each question ahead of time, and its answers and the speed with which it replied were loaded into a different computer that was used to play the game. However, software used for game strategy was run in real time, said David Ferrucci, principal investigator of the Watson project.

Nor did "Jeopardy" host Alex Trebek make the trek to Boston. Actor Todd Crain stood in for him, lending an animated but polished tone to the proceedings. IBM has hired Crain to host a number of mock "Jeopardy" sessions pitting Watson against former show contestants, he said.

Watson played the top, real-life "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter earlier this year and both of them.