A while back I was forced to watch Jeopardy by my teacher, however this was no ordinary game of Jeopardy. This game had a super computer, whose name was IBM Watson, a computer that is loaded with over 90 servers and was designed to play Jeopardy. During the three day Jeopardy event Watson crushed his human competitors almost every single time. Watson uses all of his downloaded information to then select the right answer based on percentages.
That is how IBM Watson runs, and when you think about it Watson has an unfair advantage against the other contestants, because he has access to the entire world ready the second he needs it, while human memory can be tricky and may not always be one hundred percent accurate. He also does not need to press the buzzer like other contestants, which is a slight advantage to Watson.
Although Watson was not the only one with an advantage, for example, the questions on jeopardy are supposed to be more indirect, which is harder for a computer to analyze, which gave the humans a leg up on that department. However that was really the only advantage the humans had.
During the final Jeopardy one of the contestants, Ken Jennings, had put a particular comment on his answer that had won the laughs of many, Ken wrote, “I for one welcome our new robot overlords”(Jennings). Although I did laugh almost uncontrollably, I realized that this may be a joke now but who knows maybe in a few years from now robots will become so sophisticated and independent. I know it sounds farfetched now however, if you look back several years ago to today you can see that technology has improved exponentially, and if we continue the path that we are on now who knows what will be created in the future.
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