'Jeopardy' computer takes on humans Monday night

Artificial intelligence is all around us. There's the subtle and seemingly harmless AI, like the software of the Music Genome Project that spawned Pandora and influenced competing services like Last.fm or the driving force behind any character of the virtual environment of a video game.

Then there are the more complex systems, like those used to land aircrafts or manage vast networks of weapon and security systems for organizations like the military.

But at the end of the day, the human being always won because ... well, it created the intelligence. AI was, after all, artificial and could never stand up to the real thing. Well, that notion, which has been questioned and turned inside out thousands of times by every science fiction writer and director for decades, is facing one of its most threatening challenges yet - Watson.

Watson is the name of the IBM supercomputer six years in the making that is capable of playing the knowledge-based game "Jeopardy!" with frightening efficiency. Watson will be facing off against "Jeopardy!'s" most talented players in history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a three-day special event Feb. 14, 15 and 16.

To someone not well-versed in the show, it may seem trivial and obvious that a supercomputer could play the game well. But "Jeopardy!" is not just about facts. Any modern computer, even one not hooked up to the Internet (Watson is Web-free by the way) can store troves of information, allowing it to come up with any answer if the question was worded correctly.

But "Jeopardy!" isn't just about facts; the trivia game show employs highly complex word problems littered with puns, nuances, pop culture references and even the occasional requirement that host Alex Trebec pronounce a word with a certain inflection to give contestants a good enough clue to claw for an answer.

The fact that a computer could digest a clue in a similar fashion to the impossibly unique human brain shows the power of modern-day computing and artificial intelligence,
raising promising questions about the future of the fields, while plunging us yet again down the philosophical and sociological rabbit holes to debate what makes us human and what the nature of true human intelligence is.

If Watson wins, many may write it off as the obvious byproduct of such enormous computing power. Watson, after all, is loaded with 15 terabytes of RAM (that happens to be about 7,500 times faster than your standard Macbook) and 2,880 processors pushing a joint 80 teraflops, all stored on a whopping 10 racks of IBM 750 servers filling an entire room, according to a mid-January article by Engadget.com that delved into the production and upkeep of the supercomputer. Also factor in the fact that "Jeopardy!" is a buzzer-based game, meaning that if Watson happens to come upon the answer before Jennings or Rutter, then it should surely beat them in a reflex contest.

Considering Watson’s tech specs, that means that the only edge Jennings and Rutter have over the computer is their flesh and bone.

In a recent Esquire interview, Ken Jennings, who already knew the outcome of the prerecorded game but whose contract requires secrecy, expressed how it was as much a fun look at the power of computers as it was a testament to the progression of artificial intelligence and its threats to the human race's superiority.

Jennings expressed how Watson’s shortfalls came only in his cognitive sectors, where a human being’s brain does, for the time being, outperform that of the most data-encased AI’s. “Jeopardy! isn't chess. It isn't a binary game; it's not call-and-response. Each clue is its own little geometry puzzle, a riddle buried underneath puns and wordplay,” writes Chris Jones in the Esquire piece.

Even the most cool-headed of game show contestants dished out a few pro-humanity jabs at IBM's baby. "Watson might be able to answer a clue, but it could never write a new one," Jennings told Esquire. "It can figure out how to tell a joke, but it will never laugh at it."

In the greater world of AI technology, one of the trademark progression tests has yet to be passed by our hard-wired companions. The Turing Test, held annually, revolves around seeing if AI-powered chat bots can fool at least one third of a judging panel that talks with both the computers and real human beings anonymously through an instant messenger. In a brilliant article in last month's The Atlantic magazine, Brian Christian competes in the last Turing Test as one of the human chatters and witnesses firsthand that the AI bots come within a few percentage points of passing the test and taking a symbolic step forward. The machines lost that one, but are getting better every year.

So come Monday, the whole world, or at least any diehard fan of "Jeopardy!" and every computer geek on the planet, will have their eyes glued to the two men and the machine. Viewers will certainly be eager to see if the machines can score a victory -- and take one more step toward blacking out the sun and enslaving the human race ... or something to that effect.