Comparing Wolfram|Alpha to IBM's Watson Computer with 'Jeopardy!'

IBM’s Watson computer will soon compete on the TV program Jeopardy! In a recent practice round, Watson surpassed Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, reported TMCnet.

The practice session comes ahead of a million-dollar tournament that will be televised next month.

Stephen Wolfram recently did an analysis, now posted on his blog, which compared Wolfram|Alpha to the IBM project featuring Watson. Wolfram|Alpha is constructed on a very different paradigm from IBM’s (News - Alert) Watson. But there are some similarities.

In their analysis, Wolfram and his colleagues analyzed some 200,000 Jeopardy! clues to discover the speed and percent answered correctly through conventional search tools, such as Google (News - Alert).

Wolfram said that IBM’s Watson system follows a tradition of starting “with textual documents” then building “a system to statistically match questions that are asked to answers that are represented in the documents.”

Earlier versions of this approach could be found 50 years ago. Watson, of course, has some unique features added to compete on Jeopardy!

Wolfram|Alpha differs from Watson. It is “much more radical” and is based on a different paradigm, Wolfram says.

“Wolfram|Alpha is not dealing with documents, or anything derived from them. Instead, it is dealing directly with raw, precise, computable knowledge,” Wolfram said.

It also is not using statistical representations of text, but representations of knowledge, Wolfram added.

Wolfram says that Wolfram|Alpha may soon be able to compete in something similar to Watson’s Jeopardy! challenge. But it will get there in a different way from IBM’s Watson.

In addition, Wolfram said that if there’s a future Watson 2.0, it should be equipped to call the Wolfram|Alpha API. When it comes to answering diverse questions, Wolfram|Alpha’s ability to compute will be very important.

Watson will likely change the public’s expectations for interaction with computers, according to Wolfram. IBM’s Watson will also give people a chance to see what’s possible in the Wolfram|Alpha, according to Wolfram.

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