The world’s best US Jeopardy player is no longer from the human race and rather an IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Sadly the match wasn’t close with machine way ahead of the best that humans can muster. When all was said and done, Watson won $77,147, far more than Brad Rutter @ $21,600 and the 74-time champion Ken Jennings @ $24,000. This was due to Watson's ability to dissect complex human language and return correct responses far faster than Brad and Ken. Just a couple of years ago, Watson could not even answer 20% of questions asked.

John Prager, one of the researchers developing Watson’s has said that the programe was written in Java and C++. He also expanded that the ability to answer complex questions, gave a presentation detailing the work he and his colleagues did to turn Watson into a Jeopardy champion. During this presentation and a Q&A afterwards, Prager and fellow researcher Burn Lewis revealed some key nuggets of information, such as why Watson made those odd, uneven bets during Daily Doubles (an IBM researcher thought it would be boring if Watson’s bets ended with zeros, so he added random dollar amounts for kicks) or which programming languages the researchers used to build Watson.

Apparently, there are two parts to winning at Jeopardy. The first part is actually knowing the answer to the questions, and the second part is winning the buzzer, so that you actually get to answer the questions. You have to do both of those if you’re actually going to win the game.

IBM Watson researcher Eric Brown in the Wired.com interview said:-
"The goal really is not ultimately to win Jeopardy, but rather to demonstrate the ability of the Watson technology to understand a natural-language question and generate candidate answers from all sorts of unstructured data, text data, documents, etc., and then use a wide variety of analytics to evaluate evidence for those answers, and then generate a confidence."

He further answered some key questions like:-

How does Watson actually ring its buzzer?
how do you respond to critics who say Watson has an unfair advantage because it can ring in faster?

Apparently the best Jeopardy players sometimes ring in before they may have come up with the answer, kind of a gut feeling or sense of intuition that they’ll be able to answer correctly. Apparently Watson cannot do this yet!

Brown has said that the IBM Research team made a decision that we were not going to ring in unless Watson had already computed an answer with high-enough confidence. There are human players who may have an intuition that they know the answer but don’t quite have it on the tip of their tongue, and are willing to ring in because they are confident enough that they will come up with the correct answer in the few seconds they have to actually answer after they’ve won the buzz.

People ask so what’s next for Watson? My wish list is for IBM to create an API like WolframAlpha so the technology can be used through web service by others in their applications.

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