SpawnPoint - Where Game Begins

IBM's Watson Takes Home the Jeopardy $1M

In a recent interview Bungie's lead engineer, Chris Butcher, commented on how computing innovations have revolutionized how we interact with computers, and with games. Butcher had some interesting comments on the way the I.B.M., supercomputer Watson skillfully walked away with the $1M win in last week's television's game Jeopardy.

"In fact Watson is the most recent example of humanity's empowerment by technology," Butcher says. "The scientists at IBM have created a great suite of tools for humans to use. By attaching a question-answering engine to a huge pattern-matching information database, they've demonstrated a proof of concept for machines that will be ubiquitous in our lives in ten years' time. Currently, Watson's databases are custom formatted and stored locally. But as these algorithms get utilized more widely for distributed information storage, we'll see the emergence of the Semantic Web where anyone can ask these questions of the entire Internet. Soon, we'll all have our own Watson. And that will unlock a huge amount of human potential."

Butcher seems to think that this same technology will at some point enter into the video game marketplace as well. But, it will take some time and development before the entertainment industry can take full advantage of the technology.

In another  historical battle between humans and computers, back in 1997, a computer called Deep Blue, also built by I.B.M., soundly defeated world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match.  At the time, deep blue was considered to be a significant step forward in the development of AI. And many saw a bright new future where computers would take over many of the tedious functions in our day-to-day lives. That future remains to be seen.

Deep Blue wins a chess game, 14 years later Watson wins Jeopardy. Ultimately, these systems behave just as we program them to, and demonstrate just how difficult it will be to develop a computer that can mimic the complexity of the human mind. Or, perhaps it's more basic than that.

In any case, what strikes me as most interesting is how with all the breakthroughs in technology and software, two of the most monumental computer benchmarks have been in winning games that humans play.