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Jeopardy Man vs. Machine

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Some of the answers Watson came up with were pretty interesting. Once question was looking for the material that hedgehog quills are made of and Watson's top 3 answers were:
-keratin
-porcupine_2
-fur
Watson chose keratin correctly, but what's up with porcupine underscore two? Still, it's amazing to me Watson was able to do anything as some of those questions on Jeopardy are pretty subtle. It was also humorous to see Watson answer "Toronto?????" when the question was looking for an American city's name. Even funnier was that Watson knew it likely wasn't right and bet very little money and added the ????? to the answer. Kind of impressive AND creepy.
"I for one welcome our new computer overlords."
 

CrimsonRequiem


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I heard about this on the radio. Pretty amazing. I'm surprised it knows how to guess?
 

chscag

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I saw some clips of that on Fox News last night. Quite an amazing machine. Of course the inventor (or should I say creator) of the computer is none other than "Big Iron".... Yep, IBM!

Quite a startling difference from the days of the 1401, 1410, and famous 360/50 machines. Anyone remember those?
 
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From ZDNet:

According to David Davidian, an IBM Senior System Architect, “Watson is a massively parallel system based on the IBM POWER7 750 in a standard rack mounted configuration.” It can run AIX, IBM’s house-brand Unix; IBM I; and Linux. To compete on Jeopardy Watson is running Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Watson is made up of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage. Davidian continued, “This is enclosed in ten racks including the servers, networking, shared disk system, and cluster controllers. These ninety POWER 750 servers have four POWER7 processors, each with eight cores. IBM Watson has a total of 2880 POWER7 cores.”

We run SAP (R3 and others) on P7-720s and 750s at work. I thought we were pretty sweet with 2TB of RAM. Watson makes our POWER-HA Cluster look like an iPad. Note each Power 7 processor has 8 cores (virtual processors) and each of those have 4 logical processors. This allows for 256 multi-threads to run simultaneously.
 
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In a way Watson is like a baby. It learns through repetition. And it'll have a % chance of success for any answer in it's head. I'm sure the Toronto answer it thought was a small % chance of success. But it was probably the best answer it had. Hence the ???.

Now the big question. Is Watson the first step towards Skynet?

**************

I Lost On Jeopardy by Weird Al Yankovic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_25xlCcsJQ

The perfect song for this I think. And yes the people did lose.
 
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In a way Watson is like a baby. It learns through repetition. And it'll have a % chance of success for any answer in it's head. I'm sure the Toronto answer it thought was a small % chance of success. But it was probably the best answer it had. Hence the ???.

Now the big question. Is Watson the first step towards Skynet?

**************

I Lost On Jeopardy by Weird Al Yankovic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_25xlCcsJQ

The perfect song for this I think. And yes the people did lose.

not the first step, that came loooooong ago. A large step, though! Probably more important was the development of the POWER7 and its DARPA funding.
 
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That is really cool, I might have to start watching Jeopardy.
 
OP
iWhat

iWhat

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That is really cool, I might have to start watching Jeopardy.

The Watson special is over, but I'm sure you can find something on YouTube. I think it was only three days.
 
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Watson is just a nickname. His real name is Skynet.
 

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