Meet the AI that IBM Research is teaching to debate human beings

I've been told it helps to take a deep breath. But unfortunately, I cannot do that." The setting is a competitive debate being held at Watson West, IBM's AI outpost in San Francisco's tech-centric SOMA neighborhood. Noa is Noa Ovadia, a champion debater from Israel. The speaker greeting her is her opponent--whose inability to breathe deeply makes perfect sense given that it's a piece of software, generating Siri-like female speech that emanates from a human-sized black column with a screen on its front. This is indeed the first time that the software in question, Project Debater, has shown its stuff outside of secret trial runs. Since 2012, IBM Research has been teaching it to debate humans on a vast array of subjects--making it a successor to Deep Blue (which beat Garry Kasparov in a six-game chess match in 1997) and Watson (which won a Jeopardy tournament against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011). That was good enough to make the exhibition a success in the eyes of Noam Slonim, a senior technical staff member at IBM's research center in Haifa, Israel and the person who originally proposed the Project Debater idea in 2011. The effort now includes dozens of researchers at multiple IBM labs and is led by Slonim's Haifa colleague Ranit Aharonov. Merely seeing the software keep the audience engaged over a 20-minute debate "was a very positive feeling," he tells me at a post-debate reception. Witnessing a computer thrash the Kasparovs and Jenningses of competitive debating at their own craft would be an epoch-shifting moment, but "our goal is not to develop yet another system that is better than humans in doing something," stresses Aharonov. Instead, IBM wants to create debating software that can spar with "a reasonably competent human, but not necessarily a world champion, and come across holding its own," says IBM director of research Arvind Krishna. Still, even if the company is keeping its aspirations in check, its latest adventure in AI involves challenges unlike any it's tackled before. Soon after Watson bested Jennings and Rutter in a tournament taped at IBM's Yorktown, N.Y. research center in January 2011, the company began to think about how to top that memorable feat of artificial intelligence. "All of the thousands of researchers … got the same email asking what should be the next AI grand challenge that IBM Research should pursue," remembers Slonim. The goal, he explains, was to come up with a project that was "scientifically interesting and challenging and would have some business value.