While IBM's Watson obviously got a ton of attention for winning its big national TV challenge against two Jeopardy stars, apparently, IBM is taking the Jeopardy playing machine on tour, with a key stop being Congress. It got to play against a group of our elected officials... and one of them actually beat Watson. Say hello to Rep. Rush Holt -- who was a bit of a ringer, since he's actually a five-time Jeopardy champion. Holt apparently outscored Watson $8,600 to $6,200, though all the other Congressional Reps who went up against Watson were unable to master the computer. I guess this means that we should make Rep. Holt our new leader when the machines come to try to enslave us.

An anonymous tipster points us to a really interesting comment by Peter Hirtle on a Laboratorium.net post discussing Watson, the Jeopardy-playing computer, where he asks whether or not Watson infringes on copyrights:

From IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Wins Practice Jeopardy Round in Wired Magazine: "Researchers scanned some 200 million pages of content -- or the equivalent of about one million books -- into the system, including books, movie scripts and entire encyclopedias."

It seems unlikely that IBM got permission to scan one million books. Can we expect soon a lawsuit from the Author's Guild against IBM and the producers of Jeopardy! (which, after all, is profiting from this scanning)?

This is a really good point and (once again) highlights the ridiculousness of copyright in certain circumstances. Of course, your viewpoint on this may depend heavily on whether or not you believe Google's book scanning infringed on copyright (I don't). But, for those who do, do you believe that IBM's scanning of books does infringe? Technically, it's the same basic process. In fact, you could argue that with Watson it's much more involved, because Watson then actually made use of the actual data to a much greater extent than Google did with Google books.

But, really, a bigger point is how this highlights one of the oddities of copyright. If you read something and retain it in your brain, is that infringement? Most people say no, of course. Now, if a computer "reads" something and retains it in memory is that infringement? Well, that's a bit more borderline according to many. So take it a step further and as we reach the point that people can augment their wetware brains with computer brains... when do we hit a copyright infringement issue?

Today is the final game of Jeopardy! where the IBM supercomputer Watson plays against two of the best human players to ever compete on the show. Folks on the East Coast already know the outcome by now, so feel free to ruin the suspense in the comments below for those of us in later time zones. But whatever the outcome, Watson's performance has been pretty interesting to watch. And let's hope these supercomputers don't start playing thermonuclear war any time soon. In the meantime, here are some links on AI beating humans at other games and tests.

• Deep Blue won its first game of chess against Garry Kasparov in 1996. The computer didn't win the match that year, but it won the re-match in 1997. [url]
• Checkers was declared "solved" in 2007 by the Chinook project. Chinook was actually stronger than any human player by 1996, but it took a few more years for Chinook to realize checkers was a futile game (like tic-tac-toe) and retire. [url]
• A few years ago, the Polaris poker bot beat a few professionals at Texas hold'em. So be careful playing poker online... [url]
• The famous long bet between Mitchell Kapor and Ray Kurzweil has $20,000 riding on the question of whether or not AI will pass a Turing test by 2029. The bet started in 2002, and Kapor even suggested back then that a machine might win at a Jeopardy! game show. [url]
• To discover more interesting stuff on artificial intelligence, check out what the robots at StumbleUpon suggest. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Last month, we wrote that the IBM computing project Watson was ready to take on real Jeopardy contestants in February of this year (just a few years after the project first came to life). While the big test isn't until Valentine's Day, apparently they had a dry run, and things are looking pretty good for Watson, who beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It wasn't a complete domination. Apparently Watson just narrowly edged out Jennings, though Rutter couldn't keep up. Of course, between now and the real test, Watson can be tweaked. Jennings' and Rutters' brains are pretty much set, and I'd imagine that their ability to cram more useless trivia in their brains is outmatched by Watson.

In April of 2009, we wrote about how IBM was working on a new computer, called Watson, that would be able to compete on the game show Jeopardy. It was no chess playing computer, but it was still an interesting project. Apparently, it's advanced enough that it's scheduled for its first appearance on the show, this upcoming February (Valentines Day -- so romantic), where it will take on two of the most successful Jeopardy contestants ever. While it might seem simple -- you just have to load up the machine with a ton of trivia -- it's a bit more complicated than that, because the Jeopardy "clues," can be a bit tricky, often using "subtle meanings and riddles." Apparently, those things have still been stumping Watson in testing. The report notes: "Watson had some trouble recognizing double meanings and sometimes confused fiction as fact." In other words, this actually is an attempt to push computer natural language recognition tools forward.

The world of supercomputing and artificial intelligence has always been fascinated with games like chess, Go and poker -- where evaluating strategies for winning could be approached using vast computational resources. Another historical challenge for AI projects is the classic Turing Test, which requires an understanding of human communication in order to pass the test. So it's interesting to see IBM starting a project called Watson (named after IBM's founder, not Sherlock's assistant) to create a computer to compete on Jeopardy! against human contestants -- because doing so combines the goals of natural language processing and strategic game planning.

Obviously, though, Watson is more of a product demonstration than a serious research project to advance the field of computer science, but it's still a brilliant move, nonetheless, since the effort can be understood by anyone who watches popular game shows, and at the same time, the project studies a practical problem for algorithms. However, the game of Jeopardy! is somewhat trivial (no pun intended, honest) since Jeopardy's given answers all have matching questions -- and it doesn't really require true comprehension to guess (apparently, human contestants respond correctly about 85% of the time). Granted, Jeopardy! is a bit harder to play than Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but Alex Trebek doesn't seem quite as computationally demanding as search engines can be (unless you count the audio/video Daily Doubles?). Still, IBM should be applauded for supporting its research as eye-catching PR campaigns -- while other companies like Microsoft are getting more attention for downsizing their research divisions.