SAN FRANCISCO — The human brain may be the ultimate super computer, but artificial intelligence is catching up so fast that it can now hold a substantive debate with a human.

IBM’s Project Debater made its public debut in San Francisco Monday afternoon, where it squared off against Noa Ovadia, the 2016 Israeli debate champion, and in a second debate against Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The new AI system is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, the program that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Watson, which bested humans on the game show Jeopardy.

In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. The skinny, black, rectangular screen stands about five and a half feet tall, putting it around the same height as a human opponent.

“Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans,” said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research.

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IBM's Project Debater Wants to Argue With You [nextgov.com]