The other night, I could hear my daughter in her room talking; well more like explaining what sounded like schoolwork. Rather than opening the door, I assumed she was recording her voice on her iPod, something she had done for years. This was understandable because not 15 minutes earlier I had pulled the plug on the evening saying she could finish the typing and print out her completed assignment in the morning. It was now bedtime.

But then she started to include words for punctuation. “Period. Comma. New paragraph. “I knocked softly.
She was holding a notebook in one hand and her iPod in the other. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m dictating my notes. Then I’ll email them to myself, and print them in the morning,” she said as if it was obvious. Then she gave me that great knowing grin of hers. The Dragon Dictate app glowing on her iPod touch.
I did what I do best. I got out of her way. And I’m not alone in this approach.
As the TV events of this evening approaches, I know tomorrow will be a time for reflection about technology. Once beyond the question of win or loss, more grand implications will hit home. What if it wins, then what? What if it loses, now what? And maybe most importantly, what is it?
The ‘it’ in question, of course, is Watson, the IBM computer playing the game show Jeopardy.
‪IBM Watson: Countdown to Jeopardy!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP4Jc5rGT1A[/youtube]

IBM states that “Watson is an application of advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. At its core, Watson is built on IBM’s DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring. Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor’s massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watsons IBM DeepQA software which is embarrassingly parallel (that is a workload that executes multiple threads in parallel).

Embarrassingly parallel?  Is that all humans are?

On the surface, I can’t help but consider the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote:

“Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!”

We are not talking just any machine, but the enormously expensive Watson. It’s not your grandpa’s chess playing computer, but something much different. Chess is a game of strict rules, of probabilities, of historical games, and of value determinations. Jeopardy, on the other hand, is an information game. One that makes the amount of topics and clues feel much more like an infinite number of possibilities than the just mindboggling number found in chess. And even worse, while chess is often played in silence, Jeopardy is verbal with all its nuances, innuendo, puns, and even humor. How can many of our supposedly human qualities be reduced to machine language? And what are the implications to science teachers? What if your 4^th grade teacher could really know everything?
At the moment I type this, I find solace in the flawed scientific design of this computer-against-man experiment. Is Jeopardy! a real test of anything? Are Watson’s competitors representative of humanity at large, or merely outliers (smart outliers, but still outliers)? And did any other computers get a chance to write some of their own questions, or is this a human-biased set of challenges?
Our popular fiction is filled with man vs. machine challenges, most launched with a screw-up on our part, and an opportunistic machine on their (its?) part.
Will Watson challenge us like HAL9000? Or will this be more of a War Games tic-tac-toe draw? Or maybe even an out of control Skynet?
Either way the outcome will be filled with contemplatables.
(I made up that word so any computer reading this won’t know what I have planned)
Today’s game is over. A draw? A draw?
Hmmm. Better analyze the results and get back to you.