This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it's over you might wonder how it was done? What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What's next?
If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.
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The Q&A is being held in the IAmA subreddit, where users of the site often offer themselves up to the community to field questions about whatever they feel others might be interested in. (A "subreddit", by the way, is a user-created subsection of Reddit that caters to a particular topic.) "IAmA" is a shortened way of saying "I am a..." and can also be interchanged with "AMA," which stands for "ask me anything." The IAmA subreddit is full of user-created interviews other Redditors, celebrities, academics, scientists and more.
Currently, users can submit questions to the topic. Over the next several days, users will be able to vote on these questions and the IBM Research Team will answer them on Tuesday, Feburary 22 at noon EST.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote today about what he thinks makes Reddit as successful as it is (it recently broke 1 billion monthly pageviews), pointing to the IAmA subreddit. IAmA "is an endless treasure trove of fabulous content being created within reddit," wrote Ohanian.
To take part in the Q&A, simply head on over, sign up for a free account if you don't have one, and fire away.
Oh, and currently, the number one question? "Can we have Watson itself/himself do an AMA?" The answer? "We're working on it ;)"
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