In a first, a public debate was held between an artificial intelligence system developed by IBM and two human debaters. And from the scores given by the live viewers it seems that IBM has reached a milestone in creating artificial intelligence that uses vast amounts data recall to respond extemporaneously to a situation it is put in.

The AI, called Project Debater, was placed on stage in a packed conference room at IBM’s San Francisco office in a 6ft tall black panel with a blue, animated “mouth”. It faced off against two human debaters Noa Ovadia and Dan Zafrir. Noa Ovadia is the 2016 Israeli debate champion, and the second debate was against Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel.

For each of the two short debates, participants had to prepare a four-minute opening statement, followed by a four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute summary. The opening debate topic was “we should subsidize space exploration”, followed by “we should increase the use of telemedicine”.

In both debates, the audience voted Project Debater to be worse at delivery but better in terms of the amount of information it conveyed as well as the substance of its argument. The Guardian notes that despite several robotic slip-ups, the audience voted the AI to be more persuasive (in terms of changing the audience’s position) than its human opponent, Zafrir, in the second debate.

So how did Project Debater create an argument against an award-winning debater? The Verge explains that the AI essentially created a composition paper kind of argument in just a couple of minutes when presented with a debating topic it had no specific preparation for. The system has “several hundred million articles” that it assumes are accurate in its data banks, which are about 100 areas of knowledge. When it gets a debate topic, it takes a couple of minutes to explore through them, decides what would make the best arguments in favour of the topic it has been given, and then creates a little speech describing those points.

This comes from Project Debater’s ability to “dive into a lot of data very quickly and gather information and numbers we don’t have access to quickly,” said Ranit Aharonov, manager of the Project Debater team in Haifa, Israel.

Project Debater looks for sentences and clauses in journals that are relevant to the topic and determines what the potential clashes could be around the topic, according to Aharonov. It then listens and thinks — an act illustrated by three dancing circles on its screen — before it prepares to deliver its counterpoints.

The AI isn’t trained on topics — it’s trained in the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. “Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow,” said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research. “In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is — not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game.”

Krishna said in a blog post “Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans.”

The company also notes in its statement, “This technology will expand upon the capabilities of IBM Watson, which is being used today by dozens of companies to mine massive, internal data sets for new business insights. The system already uses Watson Speech to Text API, and it will contribute to enhancing Watson’s advanced language and dialogue features. Project Debater’s underlying technologies will also be commercialized in IBM Cloud and IBM Watson in the future.”

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 20, 2018 03:26 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).