NOVA
Season 38 Episode 13 - Smartest Machine on Earth
Augmenting human intelligence is a lot tougher than it looks, and the promise of "Hal" from 2001: A Space Odyssey is still just a fantasy. But scientists are edging closer with machines like "Watson," an IBM computing system that is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge: taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Given the complexity of human language, could any computer truly understand it? It remains to be seen if this amalgam of circuits and silicon can really take us closer to the dream of a fully developed artificial intelligence, a truly "conscious" machine. Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent."
Episodes in Season 38
Building the Great Cathedrals
55 min
Emergency Mine Rescue
55 min
Trapped in an Elevator
55 min
Dogs Decoded
55 min
Secrets of Stonehenge
55 min
Quest for Solomon's Mines
55 min
Secrets Beneath the Ice
55 min
Deadliest Earthquakes
55 min
Making Stuff: Stronger
55 min
Making Stuff: Smaller
55 min
Making Stuff: Cleaner
55 min
Making Stuff: Smarter
55 min
Smartest Machine on Earth
55 min
Crash of Flight 447
55 min
Venom: Nature's Killer
55 min
Japan's Killer Quake
55 min
Power Surge
55 min
How Smart Are Animals?
55 min
