Watson on Jeopardy

Well, this was just way too cool for me.

A computer competeing on Jeopardy. Winning Jeopardy, even.
I wanted to talk about this a little bit because of some reactions people seem to be having.

1. I've seen several people commenting that Watson was nothing special, and was really nothing more than a big,fast,google type of thing.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If one actually took the time to listen to the history and capabilities of Watson as explained in the shows many background segments, it doesn't just take in keywords and return pages of results. It actually processes and largely understands statements made in natural english, including puns, metaphors and similies. Once it understands the question and determines what it is being asked to find, it actually sorts through its database of unstructured information(many thousands of pages) in order to arrive at an answer that has the highest probability of being correct. And it does this in three seconds or less(the timing needed to be competitive on Jeopardy). To do this, it has ten racks of IBM Power 750 servers,2880 processor cores,15 terabytes of RAM, and runs at a speed of 80 teraflops(80 trillion floating point calculations per second).

It's database consists of the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica,Wikipedia,the Bible, and the Internet Movie Database.

Is it perfect? No. Is it more than a big google? Most certainly.


2.The evil computer takeover.

Yep. Some are seeing it already. Or thinking they do.

Yes, Watson is impressive and contains major breakthroughs in certain areas of AI and data handling, but it's not ready to do away with us just yet. For all its abilities, Watson is still just a computer. No personality,no emotion, no self awareness, and no ability to act totally independent of humans. These are the things computers would need in order to actually pose a threat to us, and we are still a very long way from getting there. Watson is just a tool. Nothing more nothing less.

Although, I really wouldn't mind having one in my basement once the price comes down a bit.:)