Computing... Dear.I came across an article yesterday on IBM’s new supercomputer, Watson.  This computer has been trained to play Jeopardy!. 

Yes, you read that correctly, it can play the TV “phrase your answer in the form of a question” game.   And it plays it pretty well for a machine.

The article is pretty interesting although lengthy, I still recommend you take the time to read it.  While playing Jeopardy!  is a bit of a publicity stunt, it still represents a massive leap forward toward a real “Star Trek” type computer.  Which, I must say, I have been waiting for ever since saw the original series episode Tomorrow Is Yesterday.

I’ve waited patiently for that computer, and flying cars, for many years now and I’ve been sorely disappointed.   Being a programmer, I’m well aware of just how hard it is for computers to recognize speech.  What is child’s play for a human is exceedingly complex for a machine.  Not only being able to understand the words (which has advanced dramatically just in the span of my programming career) but being able to understand any implied meaning in those words is the Holy Grail of computing in my opinion.

You can play a recording of “beam me up” to any human and they’ll be able to understand the words, even if they don’t speak the language they’ll be able to pick out the words.  If they then hear someone else say those same three words they’ll recognize them.  That is virtually magic for a machine because the machine has to look at the wave pattern of the speech.  And most people know that no two voices share the same wave pattern even when they’re saying the same words.  Even when you hear a perfect impression of someone, the wave pattern of the same word or phrase between the two people is different.

Even as advanced as the Watson computer is, it is still getting the game questions as electronic texts, not parsing out the speech from the game emcee.   IBM plans to start selling the Watson computer in the next couple of years for use as an advanced document analysis tool, and that’s great use for it.

Me, however, I’ll continue to wait for my Star Trek computer in my flying car so we can play I Spy together on long trips.