So a little off topic, but still very much on the Geeky side, we wanted to briefly touch on the subject of the Supercomputer “Watson”.
Yesterday, Watson, the most advanced question answering computer in the world, build by none other then IBM, played his first match on the long running and popular game show Jeopardy. Watson took on two former human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter for an impressive match.
What is Watson?
Watson After Jeopardy!
Countdown to Jeopardy!
The Tech
Watson is made up of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage. 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.
Myself I am super excited as I like to think that the science behind Watson’s pattern recognition will be combined with machine learning in the future. Actually this is so much more that pattern matching, that doesn’t do it justice. What we are witnessing is indeed a massive step forward as Watson is making inferences from spoken language and stored concepts – almost like a “train of thought” that can be analyzed.
The possibilities are limitless, for example, a health care computer that could take in your symptoms and respond with a possible diagnosis.
Back to the game which continued today, while we could hardly contain the excitement of the familiar K.I.T.T. (think Knight Rider) like tone used by Watson, it’s also somewhat unnerving as to what the future holds for us humans.
More: IBM Watson