AI talks a good game but human triumphs

IBM fell short in its latest attempt to prove that machines can triumph over humans. But it came close.

The tech giant’s six-year-old artificial intelligence debating system, affectionately dubbed ‘‘Miss Debater’’, went head to head on Tuesday with one of the world’s most decorated debaters.

After a 25-minute rapid-fire exchange about preschool subsidies – during which the female-voiced AI showed flashes of very homo sapiens humour – the audience handed the victory to Harish Natarajan, 31.

In 1996, IBM created a computer system that beat a chess grandmaster for the first time. In 2011, its Watson supercomputer defeated two record-winning Jeopardy! contestants. Alphabet’s AlphaGo famously proved that AI can master the ancient and intricate game of Go.

But success in debating, which requires creativity and emotive elocution, has proven more elusive.

Tuesday’s event unfolded in front of hundreds of journalists, tech industry insiders and software Harish Natarajan, champion debater

engineers at IBM’s Think conference in downtown San Francisco. Chief executive officer Ginni Rometty was among the spectators, who voted Natarajan the victor but also said her company’s machine better enriched their knowledge.

Both contestants were given the topic at the same time and had 15 minutes to pare down their arguments into a four-minute speech, four-minute rebuttal and two-minute summary.

Standing at human height, Project Debater’s ominous black box remained silent except for three rotating blue circles as it mulled over 10 billion sentences from news articles and scientific journals. Natarajan notes on scrap paper.

Natarajan holds the world record for most debate competition victories and has attended three world championships, winning the European tournament in 2012.

‘‘It’s like you’re sitting there in the audience with your kid on stage competing against a worldclass pianist and everybody is watching,’’ he said.

The biggest advantage any human holds over Project Debater is the ability to deliver speech with emotion – wielding tone, inflection, pitch and pauses to sway an audience. A week ago in London, Natarajan predicted that he might have the edge after he realised ‘‘the hubris with which humans sometimes take playing against a machine’’.

IBM researcher Noam Slonim hatched the idea of Project Debater in 2011. The following year, he led a research team in Israel that began studying the way humans learn the art of debate. Their machine scans more than 300 million newspaper articles and scientific journals to identify relevant arguments on any given topic.

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‘‘It’s like . . . your kid on stage competing against a world-class pianist and everybody is watching.’’