welcome back. >> warner: thank you. great to be back. >> brown: we heard the woman activist in the piece there. that was a common thing you heard from people about the role of social media. >> warner: it's important to know that she has been leading protests ever since her husband who dared to challenge mubarak in a president shl election was put in jail. she said to me, we would take a protest, say, to parliament. we would have 80 or 100 or 120 people. on the other side... and we'd be outnumbered by the police. on the other side of the street would be people looking at us with sympathy and support. we would say join us. we're here protesting forour rights. no one would join. she would say what is wrong withy gyp egyptians? . she said that day was incredible because she was leading one of the four marches coming into the square. it was suddenly as if the ground was sprouting human beings to join them. another woman who is a former parliamentarian said i used to dismiss twitter and facebook as kind of the pastimes of the

well to do young people. she said i was so wrong. >> brown: at a very small and narrow level. >> warner: a ve narrow level of society. she acknowledged she was dead wrong. >> brown: you've looked at how social media has developed in egypt. as it's developed, who does it reach? who has it been reaching? how did that change even in the last few weeks. >> it's important to note that 20% of the population in egypt has access to the internet which is a slim number if you think about it. how many of those have access to facebook? how many of them are prepared to use it for a political means? now given the fact that these numbers are small, it shows that there was an early onset. there wa sort of an early phase whereby people came together and used the internet and used facebook, used these social networking sites to come together and coalesce these groups. because social networking brings together communities of friends, they can come out and protest as communities which is sort of a different dynamic than anything else. once that happens, then you go

on to the next phase. the second phase is where people descended to the streets and they scream out to people in neighboring homes and say, "come down." as the numbers swell all of a sudden you're accessing a community that has never touched a keyboard before. even though the numbers are fairly small, that number increased over time as people realized the utility of facebook that was evident. >> brown: in this case it was all in a very compressed period of time. >> absolutely. an incredibly short period. in 18 days you had even the website such as the names we're knowing. it had 400,000 members just before january 25. now it has somewhere in the range of 700,000. the numbers have increased since. >> own: lry ntac, we've watched this social media and al jazeera. does al jazeera and satellite tv reach a broader audience, a different audience? how does it interact with what we're talking about here?

>> this was a digital one-two punch. the social media allowed the activists to network. it got them organized in those kinds of communities, got them on to the street. but it was television that really dealt the final blow. the fact that egyptians and arabs across the region could sit in their homes watching this play out on the street meant they were inspired. so all of those people who, you know, never logged on to a facebook page could suddenly go out in the street and take part. >> brown: mr. foukara, i want to bring you in. does al jazeera see its role as you're clearly reporting this story but ear also clearly a player here, right? >> al jazeera just to add to what lawrence said just a little while ago. al jazeera is obviously the scope of the viewership is much much bigger. and for al jazeera you don't need to be educated. you don't need to be fluent in arabic. you don't need to be fluent in

the internet. the picture speaks for itself. i think what's happened both in tunisia and in egypt is there's been a marriage of al al jazeera conventional television with new media in terms of reaching the information. al jazeera both in tunisia and egypt relied on information relayed through the internet and gave it a bigger platform, not just within egypt but also in terms of informing other people in the region about what's going on inside of egypt. you know, the old political axiom in the region, if you will, is that if it happens elsewhere in the arab world, it does not necessarily mean it will happen in egypt but if it does happen in egypt you can be almost sure it will spread to other parts of the region. >> brown: larry pintac, looked at the development. what gave al jazeera such power this time? >> let's put it this way. 20 years ago when iraq invaded kuwait, most saudis did not

knoabouit for three days. because the saudi media sat on it. al jazeera comes along in '96 and changes everything. suddenly you have a channel that is seen across the region reporting in a relatively unfettered way. fast forward to today. you have almost 500 satellite channels. al jazeera played a key role here. there are plenty of other satellite channels including many private channels based in egypt that were very important in this. >> brown: on the ground, how does it play out, the mix of the social media, the internet, television. >> warner: i think what television today was amplify it. for the non-facebook generation. i'll give you one example at least. retired egyptian diplomat said to me, this was... now go back ten days. after mubarak gave his speech where he said he would not run again and his son wouldn't run again. it was a moving speech. a lot of egyptians were kind of, he said, feeling warmly towards mubarak and that he had done the right thing.

tuesday is the day that whoever it was sent in the thugs on the camels and horses. he said we watched that. we watched our young people getting attacked. he said suddenly he said i was overcome with a sense of guilt. that i had... that my generation had stayed silent and been part of this. and had not given our children a politically healthy government. he said now they're being forced to do this. he said i couldn't stay silent any longer. >> brown: he's watching on television what his younger generation had created. >> warner: exactly. and been forced to create was his point. his generation had let the kids down. and the same thing happened the night that while gonim did his first interview, the movement was starting to lose a little steam. suddenly it was on tv. he's crying as he's told 300 young people have died. he flees in tears. somebody said to me everyone at home was sitting there watching this in an endless loop because it was picked by

al jazeera. >> brown: is it also possible at the same time to overstate the role of social media, television in something like this? you know there's a great debate now about kind of twitter revolution, of facebook revolution. >> sure. >> brown: what leads the way? what is this... still the power of humankind getting out on the street. >> i think it's important not to fall into the incredible appeal of these two arguments, the argument that the technological determinism that if the technology is there that everything will fall into place, that we'll have a revolution. the other side which says it's all about people and the new media technology has no role to play. both malcolm gladwell, you know, clay sharky are probably wrong. >> brown: prominent people who made these arguments. >> probably wrong. the reality is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. you have to remember that the majority of the 80 million or over 80 million egyptians do not have access to the internet. many of them for some time had no access to al jazeera as well. when it was pulled off the

plug or when it was pulled off. some of them were able to scramble to find other sources of information but egyptian propaganda was quite influential in the early days of the revolution. in the end it was about the grievances of the egyptian population and their ability to see others come out to demonstrate in large numbers that compelled them to come out and really ask for their rights. >> own: larryintac, what do you think about this question because it comes down to controlling the message and governments can be very adept at doing that as well. >> well they can be but this showed us that there are limits to that. i mean you can't plug all those information portals now. and while social media, television are just tools, the bottom line is that this revolution started a week after tunisia. it was a direct cause-and-effect. it may have happened eventually but it was the catalyst of seeing tunisia on television that brought people out on the streets. >> brown: from watching as you have in the middle east would you expect social media, other

media, television to continue to play a role? >> absolutely. i think you saw with egypt tv fighting a rear guard action talking about foreign intervention, et cetera, it was one voice. it was effective. it got people out there to attack foreigners and journalists but the overwhelming noise, if you will, from satellite tv and other sources really overwhelmed the government's mouth piece. and now we're seeing across the region these little hick cups that are a response to all of this. i think basically governments will see from this that the old ways of doing things, the old ways of controlling the message or killing the messenger really are over. >> brown: mr. foukara, i assume you have to expect all of your team, wherever they are, have to expect that government s will do all they can to try to curtail your coverage, right? >> absolutely. i just want to go back to what adele said about the truth residing somewhere in the middle. i think that is absolutely

crucial as a new auns to make. but having said that, this is not a chicken-and-egg situation. what you have in the case of al jazeera, for example, you have a channel that has invested over in... over a period of over ten years in understanding these... how these situations... how these systems work and what the real problems are. but the fact of the situation is that there have been problems. the problems that we saw that lead to the uprising and revolution in tunisia was somewhat similar in egypt. so you have that political keg in the case of egypt waiting to happen for 30 years. but then you have that convergence of the new social media with people's wide access to television. basically governments, especially the government of egypt in this case and the government of tunisia just didn't have anywhere to hide from that. >> brown: in our last minute

you were talking to people looking at how the government was trying to deal with the media, right. >> warner: yes, jeff. their only instrument seemed to be a crude old technology of state television and professor pintac is right that they did manage to, for instance, turn out some egyptians to attack foreigners and foreign journalists. but basically they didn't have the tools. they had unleashed all of this as part of economic globalization, remember. that's how everybody got cell phones. that's how the internet suddenly got penetration in egypt but they had never mastered the art themselves. while they could try blocking the new media, they unlike some other governments in the world were not adept at using it for the own purposes. >> brown: all right. we will leave it there. margaret warner, larry pintac, thank you all four very much.

>> ifill: man versus machine, scientists just love putting that notion to the test. now a competition is under way to judge whether the latest and greatest super-computer can actually think. the faceoff occurs this week on the popular game show "jeopardy." and newshour science correspondent miles o'brien jumps right in. >> reporter: ou... now i'm not a guy to make a lot of excuses but i didn't get a lot of sleep the night before i found myself here getting ready to play watson arguably the smartest computer in the world in a game of jeopardy. >> same category. 1200. >> reporter: that's david, watson's proud papa. >> you're looking at 10 racks of power 750. there's ten racks. 90 what they call power 50 servers. >> reporter: he introduced me to his silicon progeny. >> overall it's 2,280 cores in that system. about 15. >> reporter: for those of us

who don't have a doctorate in computer science, watson is equivalent to about 6,000 high- end home computers. but the secret sauce is the software that gives watson the ability to understand language like no computer ever has. >> kathleen's excavation of this city mentioned in joshua showed the walls had been repaired 17 times. watson? >> what is jericho. >> correct. >> reporter: well enough to play jeopardy at the highest level. with top money winner brad rudder and ken jennings who won 74 games in a row in 2004. jennings' amazing run caught the nation's attention including i.b.m. executives who were looking on for a follow-up to their man versus machine triumph. the computer they called deep blue beat the grand master in a celebrated tournament in 1997. they wondered if a machine could beat the best humans at jeopardy. >> we knew it would be hard. we knew it wouldn't be easy but to have an opportunity to get the resources to sort of push the limits in advance of

technology was just irresistible. >> reporter: getting machines to truly understand language is the holy grail of a field called artificial intelligence. you know, making computers more like us. able to comprehend, learn and solve problems. in the early days of computing, it seemed so easy. >> i confidently expect within 10 or 15 years we will find emerging from the laboratories something not too far from the robot of science fiction fame. >> reporter: artificial intelligence is already here. it is used to make more accurate weather forecasts. it decides what movies and books you might like. but a computer that can match human intellect remains an elusive goal. >> there's still no machine that can solve everyday common sensical problems. >> reporter: marvin of mit says that with a healthy dose of chagrin. he told me his colleagues got on the wrong track a few decades ago trying to create a single mathematical model of

the human brain. >> i'm a little disappointed that most people look for the magic bullet. what's the trick that will make machines more intelligent? and it seems to me that we know from brain science if you look at the brain it's like 40 different computers. in fact if you look in a big book on neuro science, you'll find maybe three or four hundred descriptions of different parts of the brain. that do different things. >> reporter: that's the way david sees it. he and his team of two dozen wrote many formulas or algorithms to teach watson language skills. >> language is not going to emerge from a silver bullet. there won't be one algorithm that just understands language. it will be a lot of different algorithms. they're going to look at and interpret the language from different perspectives and somehow we'll be able to combine them. >> reporter: it took four intense years for them to write all the algorithms that make the machine ken jennings ready. the behind the scenes drama played out in the pbs nova

special the smartest machine on earth. >> administrative professional day and national cpas goof-off day. watson. >> what is holiday. >> no that's not even close really. >> reporter: for a computer jeopardy is much much harder than chess. deep blue beat caspar off by playing out every possible outcome of every possible move every time. >> it's just doing a logic puzzle very quickly and computers are good at that. >> reporter: futurist ray kurz we'll is author of the age of intelligent machines and several other books on the rise of artificial intelligence. he's impressed with watson's ability to understand something as knew nuanced and complex as human language. >> a query involving metaphors and puns and similes and jokes and other cultural references, it has a wide knowledge base it can parse these complex statements that have different attributes organized in a hierarchical fashion. >> reporter: watson cannot be

connected to the internet when it plays jeopardy. woint be fair. so the team filled its memory bank s with the entire world book encyclopedia the internet movie database much of the "new york times" archive and the bible. but synthesizing all the data is the key. to do that the team turns to a technique called machine learning. which teaches computers by example. rather than trying to define the letter a, programmers instead give the machine millions of examples and it figures out a unifying pattern so it can recognize an a that it has never seen before. watson ingested thousands of correctly answered jeopardy questions so it could learn the patterns of success in the game. do you find yourself want to go call watson he? >> i make an effort to call it it. yeah, occasionally i slip into the he. >> to waste little by little. watson?

>> what is printer. >> man, he's fast. >> reporter: he, i mean, it is a formidable foe as i was learning. did i mention i didn't have a very good breakfast that morning. >> let's finish the northern most capital city. >> let's do it. manila. kathmandu and jakarta. >> what is kathmandu. >> he was fast on that o. he knew tt category. let's do president sham rhyme time for 200 please. >> here we go. bram... pack animals? >> what is obama's lamb as. >> obama's lamas. that's what this category is all about. >> reporter: it amazed me how watson gets all the jokes the word play and the puns that are hallmarks of jeopardy. and watson gets smarter with each answer. >> it learns based on the right answers how to adjust its interpretation. and now from not being confident, it starts to get more confident in the right answers. >> watson surprises snu. >> absolutely.

in fact, you know, people say why did he get that wrong? i don't know. >> reporter: computers that rern, understand and even surprise us? what could go wrong with that? >> do you read me? do you read me, hal? >> affirmative, dave. i read you. >> reporter: oh, yeah. there is that. a machine that becomes a psychopathic murderer. >> open the doors for me, al. >> i'm sorry, dif. i'm afraid wra do that. >> artificial intelligence can be destructive. it's already used in our weapons. we have smart weapons. we sent a missile across the world. it intelligently navigates and makes its own decisions. technology can be destructive particularly in the wrong hands. the positive side is that these tools can help overcome human suffering, help cure disease. alleviate poverty. solve the energy problem.

clean up the environment. i mean there's a lot of good things we can do with more intelligent technology. >> reporter: if you get a machine that fully understands language and can learn, you just sit back and watch, right? >> right. we're not quite there yet. we're not there. where we can get a computer that completely understands language. there are all different ways of learning. you know, this way of learning is very powerful. but if you compare that to the enormity of the ways that humans learn, again, just scratching the surface. >> reporter: if watson is only scratching the surface, where does that leave me? pretty grim, eh? did i mention i've had some terrible stiffness in my thumb lately? >> ifill: you can watch all of miles' battle with watson on our web site. >> brown: finally tonight, at last night's annual music world celebration, the grammy for

"best new artist" went to esperanza spalding, a jazz singer, bassist, and composer you might remember from a story we did last fall. here's an excerpt of her song, "little fly," from the album "chamber music society ♪ ♪ little...

♪ >> brown: you can see our interview with esperanza spaulding, plus reports on several other of last night's grammy winners, by visiting "art beat" on our web site. >> ifill: again, the major developments of the day. president obama's budget proposal for the next fiscal

year came in at more than $3.7 trillion. it includes spending hikes for education and energy efficiency, but also proposes cuts and tax increases to bring down the deficit. and the ripple effects from the massive uprising in egypt have spread further across the region, with opposition protests in iran, iraq, bahrain, and yemen. >> ifill: and to hari sreenivasan for what's on the newshour online. hari? >> sreenivasan: we explore the economics of valentine's day. on our "making sense" page, find out if buying a gift for your valentine could outweigh the financial cost. we have a slideshow and video from russia, where scientists are engaged in an 18-month experiment that mimics the pressure and isolation of space flight. today-- the halfway point-- the crew experienced a simulated landing on mars. and join us at 2:00 p.m. eastern tomorrow for a live chat on the historic changes in egypt. newshour extra, our education page, has partnered with independent television service. two of the participants join us from egypt, a teen reporter and a filmmaker. all that and more is on our web

site, newshour.pbs.org. gwen? >> ifill: and that's the newshour for tonight. on tuesday, we'll talk with rand paul, the freshman senator leading the new tea party caucus. and we'll look at this year's medal of freedom winners. i'm gwen ifill. >> brown: and i'm jeffrey brown. we'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. thank you, and good night. major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by: >> oil companies make huge profits. >> last year, chevron made a lot of money. >> where does it go? >> every penny and more went into bringing energy to the world. >> the economy is tough right now, everywhere. >> we pumped $21 million into local economies, into small businesses, communities, equipment, materials. >> that money could make a big difference to a lot of people.

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