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IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing AI is off to Africa to solve pandemics

IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing AI is off to Africa to solve pandemics
IBM’s Watson computer system, powered by IBM POWER7, competes against Jeopardy!’s two most successful and celebrated contestants — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — in a practice match held during a press conference at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY on January 13, 2011. Watson will compete against Jennings and Rutter in the first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition, which will air on February 14, 15 and 16, 2011, with two matches being played over three consecutive days.

Once trained to trounce the best players on the planet at Jeopardy!, IBM’s artificially-intelligent supercomputer Watson is heading to Africa to mine data that could help solve problems like disease and water scarcity. Although IBM has had difficulty marketing Watson outside of cancer centers, it’s good that it can get back to the gainful employment of saving the world from outbreaks of cholera. You can read about the AI’s do-gooder efforts in this nice writeup by Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat.

But with all the potential for Watson’s AI to do spectacular things, it makes me wonder why videogame AI is so unsophisticated, broadly speaking. While bad guys in titles like the original Halo and Fear were pretty impressive, most of the time we get the same doofuses who lose sight of you the moment they’re off-screen. Of course, I’m not asking for game AI to reach the level of Watson, but it would be nice if there was a real initiative to use the processing power of the new consoles to sharpen game intelligence, rather than rendering a game world that is 35 times larger than the last one, which was already pretty big. I can dream, can’t I?

Jason Johnson