By KATIE EDWARDS
There are people who truly believe one day the world will be run by robots. This seems to be a bit dramatic, but fears begin to rise when Watson, an IMB super machine dominated the game of Jeopardy Monday evening this week.
With around nine million viewers watching Watson finished round one in a tie for first place with former Jeopardy champion, Brad Rutter while the other former champion Ken Jennings ended third. There was a $1 million dollar jackpot at stake.
At the end of the first round Watson was tied with Rutter; Jennings with $2,000.
Watson’s name is from IBM founder, Thomas J Watson. It took developers four years to assemble and is the size of four standard freezers. Watson is filled with 200 million pages of information from magazines, books and film scripts.
The amazing thing about this sophisticated robot is that it has the ability to not only answer the questions but also to activate the buzzer. Although this is impressive this creation does have flaws. After the first break Watson repeated wrong answers given by Jennings and also gave its own incorrect answers. It also wasn’t always the first to beat the other competitors to the buzzer. It does show however the percent confidence of the answer.
“Since Watson can understand speech it opens an all new set of doors to the way technology affects our lives. It is another step closer to a machine who thinks like a human,” junior Mark Vagelakos said.
David Ferrucci, the head of the Watson project, was pleased by his creation and had a “good feeling” at the end of the show.
After four rounds Watson ended up winning the final round with $77, 147 over Jennings who received $24,000 and Rutter scoring 21,600. As a result of Watson winning first round, he will receive a $1 million dollar prize, which will all be donated to charity, 50 percent to World Vision and the other 50 percent to World Community Grid.