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IBM AI fails to beat human debating champion
After suffering defeat to AI at Go and Dota 2, the battle between man and machine was starting to look a little one-sided. But a human has finally notched up a win against our future robot overlords. Champion debater Harish Natarajan triumphed in a live showdown against IBM's Miss Debater AI at the company's Think Conference in San Francisco on Monday. The 2012 European Debate winner and IBM's black monolith exchanged quick retorts on pre-school subsidies for 25 minutes before the crowd hailed Natarajan the victor. You can watch the debate in full below.
IBM's Watson supercomputer can help settle your debates
IBM's Watson supercomputer is already good at finding answers to tough questions, but it's going one step further: it can now argue an issue when there's no clear answer. A new Debater feature lets the machine take a given topic, scan for relevant articles, and automatically deduce the pros and cons based on the context and language of any claims. In a demo, Watson took 45 seconds to scour millions of Wikipedia articles and make cases both for and against limiting access to violent video games. It's likely that many people would take much longer, even if they're well-informed on the subject.
