Watson in the World

IBM has launched an artificial intelligent supercomputer that specializes in analyzing natural human language and answering complex questions. It was named after IBM’s president Thomas J. Watson. Watson is one of the most advanced computer system on Earth and was programmed by 25 IBM scientists over the last four years. They have scanned over 100 million books into the system, including movie scripts and entire encyclopedias. Watson showed it intelligences by square off with Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and Watson came out on top.

During this display of intelligences Watson single handedly defeated the Jeopardy champs. IBM received for first prize 1 million dollars, which they donated all to charity.   This challenge mark a milestone in artificial intelligence and Big Blue has once again led the way in the world of technology.

Watson is an advance analytical supercomputer that operates not in computer term, but in human terms. Watson uses the IBM DeepQA software and the Power7 processor in the IBM Power 750 servers. There are a total of 2880 processors cores with 16 terabytes of ram. Watson is power by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers all running the Linux operating system. The Power7 Watson can answer question under three seconds. When this question and answer system is presented with a question it uses thousands of algorithms at the same time to find an answer and then compare the selected answers to its database to examine the probability that the answer is correct.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/IBMs-Watson-16-Things-You-May-Not-Know-About-Its-Hardware-Muscle-491431/