I watched it play out on television. IBM’s newest computer by the name of Watson played against the top two all-time winning contestants to ever be on the game show Jeopardy! It was fun to watch, but you just have to wonder if it is a novelty computer or one that could change the world.
So, I read Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker who was allowed into IBM to watch all this behind the scenes. I’m not one to like technical books so I was happy to find the book didn’t require me to have a PhD to read it. It was actually really fun to read. It was written so the average person could enjoy it.
It talks about how Watson came to be and how they got the producers of Jeopardy to agree to let Watson play and then all the interesting stuff about that, but it also talks about the implications of Watson, how close we are to artificial intelligence and what Watson will be doing AFTER the game.
Here’s a video I found about the book and you can see the author talking a bit about it too-
For all you aspiring nerds you have GOT to check this out! LOL
