Thursday, February 3, 2011

Man vs. Machine: Computer to play on Jeopardy!

  Starting on February 14th, Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and Watson will be playing a three day tournament with a million dollars on the line. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter are the two top players of Jeopardy! fame, Jennings having the longest winning streak on the show and Rutter being the largest money winner after winning the Ultimate Tournament of Champions. But who is Watson? Not Sherlock Holmes' Dr. Watson, no, Watson is a supercomputer created by IBM.
  Watson is an advanced artificial intelligence designed to answer questions in a very human, very natural context. Using a complex system of algorithms to process natural language, hold, search, and retrieve terabytes of information, Watson can determine the answer to almost any question in a few short seconds. Outfitted with a buzzer, Watson is set to challenge Jennings and Rutter to an intense mind vs machine match on Jeopardy!
Ken, Watson, and Brad during a practice match on January 13th, 2011.
Posted by Carl Blum at 1:01 AM
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8 comments:

  1. CarlosFebruary 4, 2011 at 9:14 PM

    That sounds like an awesome show! Do you know if Watson is an actual physical supercomputer or if it runs through a cloud? Also any specs on it? I imagine IBM is keeping their lips sealed about that but it would be cool to know how ridiculous a processor (or many) the computer uses.

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  2. Carl BlumFebruary 5, 2011 at 1:50 AM

    Carlos,

    The Watson hardware is a massive setup of ninety IBM servers with an additional ten racks of control structure, totaling 2880 processing cores and 16 terabytes of RAM. Each core can run four threads in parallel, enabling Watson to run very complex computations very quickly.

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  3. Aaron AckermanFebruary 6, 2011 at 12:36 PM

    So this computer has more processing power than the Mines supercomputer RA? This just seems amazing and I am really excited to see how man can compete with it. It really doesn't seem like we have a chance considering the massive amounts of trivia that can be stored with that kind of hard drive capacity.

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  4. Carl BlumFebruary 7, 2011 at 5:33 PM

    Aaron,

    The power of Watson is really something to wonder at. Not just the processing power and capacity are amazing, sifting through that much data so quickly means a complex set of storage and search algorithms to go along with it. It'll be fun to see it in action.

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  5. Inyxia QuanFebruary 9, 2011 at 6:05 AM

    Just to clarify, Watson is running its algorithm using some form of onsite storage and not linking up to the internet during this? And if you know what exactly are they storing? for example are they storing some form text library such as storing a whole books and comparing between them to gain a probable answer or is Watson storing possible questions?

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  6. Carl BlumFebruary 10, 2011 at 8:15 AM

    Inyxia,

    Watson is not connected to the internet. It's been feed millions of pages of documents such as dictionaries, papers, and encyclopedias. The algorithms parse through these pages to find its answers.

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  7. Michael MussoFebruary 16, 2011 at 11:53 AM

    Did this go down recently? I'd like to see a follow up post on how Watson did.

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  8. Jen SchneiderFebruary 16, 2011 at 2:53 PM

    Watson dominated, I believe! Follow-up post, please! And maybe with video, cause it was amazing to see.

    Also, Conan did a pretty hilarious riff on this last night, with Andy beating "Watson" to a pulp.

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