FYI: Which Computer Is Smarter, Watson Or Deep Blue?
IBM's Watson IBMAnd if we combined the two, what extraordinary intelligence would they be capable of? Humans haven't fared well against IBM computers. Record-holding Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter lost to IBM's Watson last year on national television. Garry Kasparov, often considered history's greatest chess player, fell to IBM's Deep Blue in 1997. Machines outsmarted men, but which machine would outsmart the other? In some sense, neither. Comparing smarts is slippery business, especially with an English major like Watson and a math guy like Deep Blue. "They were both significantly smarter than similar systems of their type when they appeared, but the nature of their intelligence is very different," says Doug Downey, a machine learning and artificial intelligence researcher at Northwestern University. Like Johnny Unitas and Willie Mays, Deep Blue and Watson weren't programmed to compete with each other. They played and succeeded...