IBM's Watson Loses--To A Congressman!IBM's Watson Loses--To A Congressman!

Inside Watson, IBM's Jeopardy Computer

Maybe politicians aren't that dumb after all. Rep. Rush Holt (D., NJ) accomplished what two previous Jeopardy champs could not—beat IBM's Watson supercomputer at the famous quiz show.

Watson played against five lawmakers earlier this week at a match on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Holt posted a top score of $8,600 for his round, while Watson racked up $6,200 in "winnings." For the whole match, Watson beat Holt's fellow lawmakers $40,300 to $30,000.

Holt beat Watson on a number of questions from various subject categories, including "Laundry Detergents." Holt correctly identified Fab as both a cleanser and a three-letter nickname for The Beatles. "It seemed like fun, and it was a great way to illustrate the research process," said Holt, who spoke to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Holt wasn't just lucky—he holds a PhD in physics and is a former assistant director of the Plasma Physics lab at Princeton University, which lies within his mid-New Jersey Congressional district. He's also a previous Jeopardy contestant.

Watson had better luck against his human rivals in a recent match that pitted the machine against past Jeopardy champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, which aired last month. Watson's cumulative score over two games was $77,147, compared to $24,000 for Jennings and $21,600 for Rutter.

In vanquishing its carbon-based opponents, Watson won a grand prize of $1 million on behalf of IBM, which the company has said will be donated to charity.

But the computer also showed that even the most advanced AI program can be strikingly fallible at times. On one episode, it drew guffaws from the audience when it answered "Toronto" to a question that asked which city was home to airports named after a World War II hero and a famous WWII battle.

Watson named the Canadian metropolis despite the fact the question was under the category "U.S. Cities."

Watson simultaneously runs natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning algorithms to fathom the intent of questions and yield what it thinks is the best answer—all in a matter of seconds or less. The Watson program runs on IBM's new massively parallel POWER7 processors, which the company rolled out last year.