The Science Behind an Answer - Everything about Watson Jeopardy!

IBM's Watson Supercomputer took on Jeopardy! all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-day IBM Challenge round in February 2011. Here I compile most pertinent information to recap the historical event and provide food for thought

The challenge in building a computer system like Watson lies in developing its ability to understand the language of a clue, register the intent of a question, scour millions of lines of human language, weigh the evidence from the analysis, and return a single, precise answer - in a split second on the stage of Jeopardy! Game.

Preparing for the Game
Preparing Watson for the Jeopardy! stage posed a unique challenge to the team: how to represent a system of 90 servers and hundreds of custom algorithms for the viewing public. IBM, in collaboration with a team of partners, created a representation of this computing system for the viewing audience -- from its stage presence to its voice.




The Jeopardy! Game
After competing against the two greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time, the technology behind Watson will now be applied to some of the world's most enticing challenges. Watch a breakdown of the match from Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter and the IBM team members as they look toward the future.



More videos about the three day competition:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

Post-Game Panel Review
Join host Stephen Baker, author of "Final Jeopardy, Man vs Machine and the Quest to Know Everything", as he discusses Watson's performance on Jeopardy! and the possible real-world applications of this technology with the following panelists: IBM Watson Principal Investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow and CTO of IBM's SOA Center for Excellence Kerrie Holley and Columbia University Professor of Clinical Medicine Dr. Herbert Chase. See video from Ted.com.


How Watson Answer the Question

In this video, the four steps of Watson's question answering technology are covered:

• question analysis
• hypothesis generation
• hypothesis and evidence scoring
• final merging & ranking

Watson after Jeopardy!
Watson was optimized to tackle a specific challenge: competing against the world's best Jeopardy! contestants. Beyond Jeopardy!, the IBM team is working to deploy this technology across industries such as healthcare, finance and customer service.

Blog updates:

• 2012.04.13 - original post