We are also good at judging our own level of certainty. A strong human Jeopardy! player, or a human doctor, may get the answer wrong, but he is unlikely to make a huge blunder or category error-at least not without being aware of his own doubts. Worse, by definition they do not understand what they do not understand and so cannot avoid them. They play fantastically well in maybe 90% of positions, but there is a selection of positions they do not understand at all. My concern about its utility, and I read they would like it to answer medical questions, is that Watson's performance reminded me of chess computers.If all it can do is beat humans on a game show Watson is just a passing entertainment akin to the wind-up automata of the 18th century. If Watson's skills can be translated into something useful, something groundbreaking, that is the test. For example, Deep Blue had no real impact on chess or science despite the hype surrounding its sporting achievement in defeating me. If how the result is achieved matters more, I'm not so sure. If the result-the chess move, the Jeopardy answer-is all that matters, it's a success. Much like how computers play chess, reducing the algorithm into 'crunchable' elements can simulate the way humans do things in the result even though the computer's method is entirely different.To me, this means Watson is doing good job of breaking language down into points of data it can mine very quickly, and that it does it slightly better than Google does against the entire Internet. But if you put the questions from the show into Google, you also get good answers, even better ones if you simplify the questions. A convincing victory under strict parameters, and if we stay within those limits Watson can be seen as an incremental advance in how well machines understand human language.Kasparov accused IBM of cheating in the match and requested a rematch but was denied.ДЇind below Kasparov's initial take on Watson, offered via e-mail through an aide: The Russian world chess champion defeated IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996, then lost in a six-game rematch in 1997 that surprised many and revealed a nascent truth: In closed-system contests of raw data computation, computer technology had evolved an edge over the most talented and disciplined human minds. machine competition (the topic of this month's Atlantic cover story), Kasparov holds the most prominent of historic places. The true test of Watson's significance, Kasparov says, will be whether it can be translated 'into something useful, something groundbreaking'-applied in a more meaningful way, beyond the game show. Kasparov reviewed the three-day contest and offered his initial thoughts exclusively to The Atlantic. That's what the Russian world chess champion said when asked for his thoughts on last week's Jeopardy! contest between two champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and IBM's new Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer.

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