Title:
A Victory for Computers as Watson Wins 'Jeopardy!'
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
An IBM super computer named Watson has won the
latest battle of man versus machine. Watson won the
first ever "Jeopardy!" quiz show competition
starring a computer as a player. The show was
broadcast on American television February sixteenth.
The super computer defeated former "Jeopardy!"
champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter during the
three-day competition. The two men had been the
show's most successful players until then. The IBM
computer proved to be more knowledgeable in every
category, including the arts, popular culture and
science. The human contestants spoke about their
loss after the show. They said they both got a taste
of what it might have been like to play against
them. Roger Norton is dean of the School of Computer
Science and Mathematics at Marist College in
Poughkeepsie, New York. The school held a Watson
watch party on the final day of the "Jeopardy!"
competition. They compared it to a Super Bowl for
the information technology industry. Roger Norton
says everyone was amazed by Watson's performance,
especially its ability to understand natural
language.In "Jeopardy!" players are given
information in the form of an answer. They must give
an answer in the form of a question. Roger Norton
says the very nature of the game makes Watson's
performance even more extraordinary. Watson was
given the answer clues by electronic texts. It then
searched through some fifteen trillion bytes of
information stored in its database. That is equal to
about two hundred million pages of text. The machine
is able to perform up to eighty trillion operations
per second. Its ability to understand language is
more advanced than any other computer ever
developed. This opens the door to a whole new world
of computer applications. From business and
investment, to medicine and healthcare, the
possibilities are endless. Watson is now going to
medical school. It is part of an agreement among
IBM, Columbia University Medical Center in New York
City and the University of Maryland's School of
Medicine. The researchers will help IBM identify the
best way that Watson can be used to help the
healthcare industry. For VOA Special English, I'm
Carolyn Presutti. Our programs are online with
transcripts and MP3 files at voaspecialenglish.com.
And you can find us on Facebook at VOA Learning
English.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
