Tuesday, February 15, 2011

IBM's 'Watson' Pits Man vs. Machine on Jeopardy!

Nova: The Smartest Machine on Earth

Chapter 1



Chapter 2



Chapter 3



Chapter 4



Chapter 5



Chapter 6


Update: After day 2 of Jeopardy, IBM's Watson is impressively kicking the butts of its human competition. Watson consists of ninety clustered IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage running Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Watson uses IBM DeepQA software to “understand” natural language questions and answers like those in Jeopardy. Doing this is really the hard trick for Watson and its designers. Humans don’t talk or think clearly or logically. To work out what someone means, a computer needs to understand context, slang, puns and a hundred other things that we take for granted when we talk to each other.

Update #2: The final tally from the two games: Watson at $77,147, Jennings at $24,000 and $21,600 for reigning champion Brad Rutter -- who previously won a record $3.25 million on the quiz show. "I for one welcome our new computer overlords," contestant Ken Jennings -- who holds the "Jeopardy!" record of 74 straight wins -- cheekily wrote on his answer screen at the conclusion of the much-hyped three-day showdown.

2 comments:

  1. Definitely impressive. Too bad the videos are not viewable in my "region". :S

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  2. I'll post some additional videos of "Watson" in action later in the week that I hope you'll be able to view.

    ReplyDelete