I wasn’t home last night so i’m watching the recording but this is pretty damn awesome. Its pretty damn amazing what these programmers were able to get this computer to do.
For those who don’t know. Watson is a computer that was built to compete with 2 of jeopardy’s greatest champions. It receives the question via text format and then through its algorithms comes up with a confidence level on an answer. If that level reaches a certain threshold it activates an arm to press the buzzer.
Its continuing tonight and tomorrow for those who want to check it out.
I’m a sophomore at Clarkson University and IBM was here yesterday for questions and then to watch the show.
A few things my C++ class got out of them:
Watson has:
2880 Power7 Cores (Your computer prolly has 2 or 4)
15 Terabytes of RAM (Yours prolly has 4 gigs)
Can do 80 TRILLION operations a second
Costs roughly $11-12 million
Has been in the works for 4 years
A pneumatic piston to push the buzzer has a built in handicap for how long it would take a human to push the buzzer.
Watson is the size of 8 refrigerators and has its own air conditioning system.
It is not linked up to the internet in any way, it stores all of its data in memory.
It truly is amazing how it can take common language and interpret it.
Given enough data to work with for comparisons to get general rules from and enough processing power you can do a lot more than something this trivial.
Now if they can get get it to pass a Turing test convincingly - that’d be something.
Watson is the size of 8 refrigerators and has its own air conditioning system.
It is not linked up to the internet in any way, it stores all of its data in memory.
