NOVA Season 38 Smartest Machine on Earth 2011
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."
- Released: 2011-02-09
- Runtime: 55 minutes
- Genre: Documentary
- Stars:
- Director:
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1. Building the Great Cathedrals 2010-10-19
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2. Emergency Mine Rescue 2010-10-26
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3. Trapped in an Elevator 2010-11-02
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4. Dogs Decoded 2010-11-09
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5. Secrets of Stonehenge 2010-11-16
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6. Quest for Solomon's Mines 2010-11-23
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7. Secrets Beneath the Ice 2010-12-28
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8. Deadliest Earthquakes 2011-01-11
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9. Making Stuff: Stronger 2011-01-19
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10. Making Stuff: Smaller 2011-01-26
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11. Making Stuff: Cleaner 2011-02-02
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12. Making Stuff: Smarter 2011-02-09
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13. Smartest Machine on Earth 2011-02-09
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14. Crash of Flight 447 2011-02-16
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15. Venom: Nature's Killer 2011-02-23
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16. Japan's Killer Quake 2011-03-30
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17. Power Surge 2011-04-20
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18. How Smart Are Animals? 2011-02-09
