Episode
NOVA: Smartest Machine on Earth
Overview
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."
Details
- Series
- NOVA
- Season
- Season 38
- Episode
- Episode 13
- Air date
- 2011-02-09
- Runtime
- 55 min
Episode context
Smartest Machine on Earth is Episode 13 in Season 38 of NOVA. It aired on 2011-02-09. The runtime is 55 min.
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Episode 12: Making Stuff: Smarter
"Making Stuff: Smarter" looks at materials that respond to their environments and even learn, such as an airplane wing that changes shape as it flies. Scientists are turning to nature in developing such "smart" stuff. Sharkskin, for instance, has inspired a substance that, when sprayed in hospitals, could eliminate antibiotic-resistant bacteria. David Pogue visits a scientist who has even created a material that can render objects invisible. "Smarter" concludes with a vision of the ultimate in "life-like" stuff: programmable matter that could create a duplicate of a human being.
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Episode 8: Deadliest Earthquakes
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Episode 18: How Smart Are Animals?
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Episode 7: Secrets Beneath the Ice
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