Like many people, I was amazed to watch IBM’s Watson supercomputer playing Jeopardy this week against past human champions. But could Google have done the same thing? Let’s go behind the scenes of these two search masters to understand what they can — and can’t — do.
Which Clue Should I Take?
Watson has been programmed to play Jeopardy. That doesn’t mean just being stuffed with millions of possible answers. It means that Watson has been taught the game’s strategy.Watson has been taught to go for where Daily Doubles are likely to be. It knows to go for the lowest value clues in a topic to build confidence for future questions in that category. It uses bid strategies on how much to risk. IBM explains more about this in these posts below:
Google knows none of this. Google couldn’t play Jeopardy because despite knowing answers to many questions, it literally doesn’t know how to play the game. But potentially, researchers at Google could write their own game-playing software, if they wanted to try for the type of PR bonanza that IBM is enjoying right now. SEL
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