How Do You Win An Argument? IBM's New AI Has a Formula

Anyone who's spent even a little time on the internet lately may feel like there's a little too much "debate"--much of which descends into ad hominem insults. But this has not deterred IBM from pursuing "Project Debater," which was first tested on the world stage in San Francisco in June. Naturally, when you think of IBM and AI, you think of Watson, the program capable of answering natural-language questions that famously beat human contestants at Jeopardy! in 2011. IBM sees Project Debater as a natural successor to Watson. Both are, in turn, a natural progression from the search engine. Search engines can produce relevant results to key terms.