Computers turn to word games

To say chess has lost some of its standing among game lovers over the last 40 years is stating the obvious. The sky is blue, water's wet, and modern gamers would rather play Crysis or Mass Effect.

But now chess, which was long considered a sort of bench mark in determining how far computer had developed when compared to the human brain, is being tossed aside for a new game.

Ok, before you start yelling, it was never THE standard, but in terms of public perception it is — or was — the de facto standard. Only the most hardened geeks remember which computer first passed the 2 petaflop mark — because only they care what a petaflop is or know why it matters — but quite a few people know that computers long ago learned to beat the snot out of the average Moe, Larry, or Curly at chess.

The new standard for measuring how far computers have come is (drum roll) Jeopardy! The computer who will take the Jeopardy challenge, which airs from February 14-16, is a creation of IBM called Watson. IBM has been helping computers make humans feel stupid for at least the past 14 years. It was the company behind the development of Deep Blue, the machine that beat one of the best Chess players in human history, Garry Kasparov, back in 1997.

My first reaction was that a game show, especially one that I used to watch with my grandparents, might not be a good way to measure a computer's ability to compute, but Jeopardy to its credit has been making mankind feel stupid longer than IBM. Since 1984, the show has stumped people who lacked the ability to give the correct question to the show's answers. Example, under the category "websites" is the answer "Yodel Anecdotal is the name of this website's corporate blog." The correct question: "What is Yahoo?"

Chaotic rulebook

During an argument with a couple of local media types, I said I thought this was silly. Hook a computer up to Google's Voice software and Wikipedia and you're halfway there. My snarky answer was met with the argument: in chess there are rules, and if a computer can calculate all the moves and counter moves far enough ahead, it's got you beat. With Jeopardy, you're dealing with language, which has a far more chaotic rulebook than chess.

Language has rules too, but anyone who has ever learned a second language understands that knowing what a word means or how it's used won't always help you to understand the speaker. I remember back in 2006 I spent the evening sitting in a pub with an Englishman, a Welshman and a Scot (insert your own joke here). No one near the table would have ever guessed there was a common language being spoken, or why the Welshman had to translate what the Scotsman said to the American, but not the other way around. He was from Glasgow, ya ken?

I find some irony that language, which is often considered a prerequisite for thought, is so difficult to teach to a computer, which people so often compare to the human brain. Does this mean that if a computer learns a language, it would actually start to be intelligent, or even self-aware? So far, in preliminary rounds, Watson used 2,880 processors with 15 terabytes of RAM to beat 2.6kg of grey matter without any signs of launching a thermonuclear attack or changing its name to Skynet. But maybe there's still a chance (at cognition, not the nuclear war).

I'm hoping we'll see the first signs of real intelligence when Watson is asked to answer some obscure bit of trivia. Hopefully, it will quip, "Who cares?"