This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – IBM “Watson” machine defeats 2 human Jeopardy! champions

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – IBM “Watson” machine defeats 2 human Jeopardy! champions. The machine went on the show on February 16th, 2011 and faced off against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, previous winners of the famous game-show. 

The show was taped in Janaury of 2011 but was not aired until February of the same year. Instead of a regular episode, this showdown was played out over three parts, concluding on February 16th. It was filmed at one of IBM’s research lab. More than just a publicity and PR display, it was a vindication of the progress Artificial Intelligence has made in the past decades.

“Watson” is a question-answering computer system, developed by IBM as a part of their DeepQA project. David Ferrucci, an American biologist and computer scientist, headed the development of Watson as principle investigator with a research team. Watson is named after IBM’s founder and first leader, Thomas J. Watson. After its success on Jeopardy, Watson was first utilised in helping lung cancer treatment at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

The New York Times covered this event on its website. The article can be read here. A clip of Watson’s victory can be viewed here.

The HAI initative considers this an important development in the history of AI due to its publicity and notability as the culmination of a research project in artificial intelligence.