I guess I'm just waxing nostalgic tonight.
I've just been thinking back to when I first started working with computers.
I was thirteen, and in junior high school. My first computer science course revolved around the Apple IIe. Everything was via command line(Apple Pro-DOS). No hard drives. Everything had to be loaded from floppy drives and saved to them as well. No color monitors. I learned to program in BASIC. My second class, in high school, was with the then brand new Apple IIgs. The big improvements were color monitors and higher resolutions, but still no hard drive. And it really seemed to take forever to load off 3.5 inch disks. That was then.
Now, no computer even comes with a floppy drive because it would be laughable compared to the storage capacity of DVD-ROMS and multi-gigabyte flash drives. Solid state hard drives are competing with traditional mechanical drives. RAM is to places never dreamed of twenty five years ago. Computers have gotten smaller,more powerful. They can be just about anywhere now.
It's been quite the ride, and even though just about all of the things I originally learned are obsolete, I sometimes look back with fond memories of where things were, even as I appreciate where they are and what is yet to come.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
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.:)
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.:)
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