between a former debating world champion and a computer.

- So many people are here working on this production.

- Many of the previous demonstrations that we have

seen were the realm of games.

And games have very well defined set of rules.

- You could do simple things like play games,

but you couldn't do complex things

like having a debate.

- There is so many things that are connected

together and so many things need to work smoothly.

I am actually a bit stressed.

I feel the team didn't have enough time to practice.

- So I have to ask you,

who do you thinks going to win tonight?

- Well I'm partial today of course.

What we really want is to create systems that

work with us so that we can make better decisions.

- Ladies and gentlemen, here we go, Project Debater.

- Greetings, Harish.

I suspect you've never debated a machine.

Welcome to the future.

- I started my amateur debating career back in high school.

The teacher for history made the mistake of returning

the exams and saying if you want to appeal

about your score, I'm willing to hear your thoughts.

And obviously nobody seriously considered to do

that except me.

Okay I understand if you think that this is my score.

I have a different view.

Let's argue about that, in writing.

Later on I started to think about writing,

you know comedy sketches.

I started to develop a sitcom called Puzzle.

Oddly enough, the final episode of that sitcom

is entirely focused on competitive debates.

They filmed 16 episodes

and it was a complete failure.

This is how I found myself doing computer science

and artificial intelligence.

- For centuries, people have always saw the games

as a great way to measure your intelligence.

When I play chess, I want to prove to myself I'm

smarter than the other side.

If you take the position that you have to hand code

a rule for every situation,

it is insanely hard.

What we now do is you give them examples,

and they'll learn from those examples

and make their own rules compared to having to craft

all the rules by hand.

- Games have been important for AI but games

differ from debate because the classical game is a set

of equations that's fully understood.

You can draw the rules of chance.

You cannot draw the

rules of conversation, that's impossible.

- Just a couple of days after the Jeopardy! event,

an email was sent to the entire research division

asking us what should be the next era grand challenge.

I was intrigued so I offered my office mate

at the time to spend an hour and brainstorm together.

And towards the end of the hour at some point

I suggested this notion of developing a machine

that will be able to debate humans.

So we submitted the proposal in a single slide.

They told us this is impossible and this is not

a very good plan.

- I think this is a characteristic of a grand challenge

because if it is very clear to you that this is doable,

then probably this is not a grand challenge.

And if it is very clear to you that this is not doable,

then probably you shouldn't start.

It should be somewhere in between but you need to take

into consideration that perhaps you will fail.

- I didn't hear anything for a few months.

Then, February 2012, Hayah Sofail

used this chat service in IBM to text me.

And she said, "Did you hear?"

And I said, "No, what?"

And she said, "It was selected, Debater was selected

as the next grand challenge."

I was very excited and I wrote her back,

"I want to thank you for all the support along the way."

And she said, "Don't thank me yet."

(laughs)

- I'm Harish Natarajan,

and my debating record is that I won the

European Championships in 2012,

the Oxford Intervarsity and the Cambridge Intervarsity.

I've twice won the largest open tournament in the world,

the LSE Open.

And certainly, even if I'm not necessarily the best

debater in the world, I'll certainly be very

high up most people's list.

What I think debating forces you to do is you just

have to defend and justify your own opinions,

but defend and justify often the very opposite

opinions as well.

And I think that process is so valuable because I think

it makes us interrogate the beliefs and the views

which we hold.

- One of the things that happens when you take a grand

challenge is that you have to slice it up

into questions that each of them is less grand.

From the beginning, one thing you would need

is a massive collection of newspaper and journal articles

on the order of 10 billion sentences.

- Then the Debater system needed capability of being

able to automatically identify the exact boundaries

of the claim within the billions of sentences.

- And figure out if those arguments are supporting your

side of the debate or the other side.

- This is something that is very easy for humans to do

based on our knowledge about concepts in the world.

And it is very complicated for machines to do.

Now you need to arrange a meaningful narrative.

- After the opening statement, now there's rebuttal speech.

- This is being able to listen to an opponent

and respond accordingly.

- Those were the main challenges that we had

in front of us.

- And if one of these steps is not working properly,

you will end up with a useless speech.

After we were selected, it was very hard for us

to make significant progress.

Only four months after we started to work,

for the topic physical education should

be mandatory in high school,

the Debater system detects the following

claim in Wikipedia:

"Several studies have shown that lizards display

no benefit from exercise."

This is going to sound ridiculous, okay?

They're going to ask us about physical exercise,

whether this should be mandatory or not,

and how are we going to understand that these claims

are actually referring to lizards and not to

high school students?

It will be very hard to get even close to a meaningful

debate between this system and an expert human debater.

- First time I heard about Project Debater was

one of those small articles probably back in 2014

where they talked about this Debating Watson Project.

And at the time it certainly seemed like a pipe dream.

Humans are rarely just convinced by evidence

and logical rational argument.

It's about really connecting with them in one

of many different ways, some of which

aren't as rational as others.

- What I do is I coach debaters and I tell them

this is what you need to do in order to improve.

And usually a human debater, it just kind of,

their brain understands what I'm saying

and they can convert that into being a better debater.

Sometimes not, but usually.

And in this case, I am saying it to the programmers

and they're saying okay how do we take that learning

process that happens inside people's heads and convert

that into some sort of algorithm?

And that's really where the magic happens.

- It seems to me that this is a motion that basically

for the government it's impossible to defend.

- Well you can agree in general that you'd defend,

like any negative aspects to begin with.

- What I'm saying is that if you will debate me,

not as an expert debater, I will make this point.

Is there an answer to that?

- Being able to show to the world that you can

take a computer program and teach it not just to

play a game that has very specific set of rules

and very specific ways of winning but something

that is so,

so difficult for humans to learn and so subjective in how

you see it and how you hear arguments and how

you respond to arguments.

I think that that's, it's incredible.

When I joined the team, it was not at a level

where it would be competitive.

- My automatic analysis indicates that Yara

suggested that the abolition of the entire

fossil fuel field is going to create and the traumatic

effects of that and lastly,

however considering relevant data suggests some information

that may contradict this claim.

- I first heard about IBM Debater because they were

asking for volunteers to record speeches for them.

Basically, they wanted to build up this database

of speeches from people with a lot of debating

experience and then train the computer

using that database.

- I think at first, Project Debater would sometimes

give arguments that weren't necessarily for its side.

- Such mandatory minimum sentences

lead to overcrowded prisons and rightfully so.

These were the main points I wanted to raise.

- The types of arguments, the connections between arguments,

the way that we sometimes tell jokes

or sometimes we're more serious,

those are all things that they

pulled in for Project Debater.

- I often compare Project Debater to my kids and

their development because I guess my oldest

was born about the same time the program was born.

In terms of personality,

they'd be I guess on par.

My seven year old has a great personality,

they do develop that quite early.

It's scary but also nice to see that Project Debater

is developing a personality as well.

- I don't know whether to call my opponent naive,

old fashioned or just a romantic.

But this way or that, my opponent is wrong.

- I remember the Debater, she called him naive

and it was really hurt.

Suddenly he's laughed at not only by a machine,

but the audience are now bursting out laughing.

My name is Assaf Gavron,

I'm an author most of the days.

I'm in charge of writing what we call generic texts.

Little bits and little phrases that are put together

by the software.

Metaphors or quotes, opening sentences, jokes.

We had a lot of discussions about who is Debater?

- My friend, you are speaking at the extremely

fast rate of 203 words per minute.

Don't hurry, we have plenty of time.

Please slow down and present your arguments calmly.

- We never write the texts to a specific debate.

We don't know what the debate will be.

No, the magic of Debater is that it can argue on

any topic thrown at it under the sun.

So we write a general text that could fit

some topics and then the system has to identify them

and use the right ones in the right time.

- Climate change is what allows them to poison the minds

of young kids.

- Science, we know the earth is warming.

Will there be more droughts?

Yes.

- How definitive is the evidence?

Is there any room for debate?

- This is the Natasha Hall Show, on CJAD800.

- We are speaking with Dr. Aharanoff,

she is the global manager for IBM's

artificial intelligence Project Debater,

thanks for being here.

How nuts is that it could take artificial intelligence