NOVA – S38 E13 : Smartest Machine on Earth

NOVA
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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."

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Cast

Harrison Ford
as Narrator
John Lithgow
as Narrator
Keith David
as Narrator
Stacy Keach
as Narrator
Susan Sarandon
as Narrator (voice)
John Hurt
as Narrator
Liev Schreiber
as Narrator (voice)
Oliver Platt
as Narrator
Shirley Henderson
as Mileva Maric
Roy Scheider
as Narrator
Samuel West
as Humphry Davy
Joe Morton
as Narrator
Stockard Channing
as Narrator (voice)
Jim Carter
as Narrator
Derek Jacobi
as Voice of Ernest Shackleton
Frances O'Connor
as Emma Darwin
Simon Callow
as Galileo
Jay O. Sanders
as Self - Narrator (voice)
Ian Holm
as Narrator (voice)
Anton Lesser
as Voltaire
Scott Handy
as Isaac Newton
Corey Johnson
as Narrator
Julian Rhind-Tutt
as Antoine Lavoisier
Henry Ian Cusick
as Charles Darwin
Aidan McArdle
as Albert Einstein
Craig Sechler
as Narrator
Tony Robinson
as Younger Ernie
Joseph Campanella
as Narrator (voice)
Neil Ross
as Narrator
Nigel Bennett
as Sir Charles Lyell
Darri Ingolfsson
as Godfred Hansen
Steven Robertson
as Michael Faraday
Eric Meyers
as Narrator

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