CEMEX AUDITORIUM–In honor of Big Game, week, IBM brought their supercomputer Watson to take on teams from Stanford and Cal in a game of Which One of You is a Computer?
A packed audience took their seats in Cemex Auditorium, and little did they know they were in for the most suspenseful competition in years. “We looked around the entire Stanford and Cal campus, and through a cutthroat and rigorous process, we found the students who were most like computers,” said comedian and host Tom Crain, as he continued to jumble his words. “But help me if I know what a computer is.”
When the competition began, the robotic students from Stanford and Cal were no match for Watson. Watson was able to answer that he was a computer within a nanosecond, while the humanoid student participants were still perceiving the question.
When asked about the loss, Stanford team member and Mechanical Engineering major Robin Orman ’13 said, “Well, the thing about Watson is that he is a computer, so he is slightly better at being a computer than us.” Orman continued to zone off into outer space. “But only slightly.”
The Flipside asked the audience for comment about the event, but they were too busy playing with their smartphones.
