Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.

ronjor · Feb 17, 2011

By Ken Jennings

When I was selected as one of the two human players to be pitted against IBM's "Watson" supercomputer in a special man-vs.-machine Jeopardy! exhibition match, I felt honored, even heroic. I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines—which, if Hollywood is to be believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York's Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn't the hero at all. I was the villain.
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http://www.slate.com/id/2284721

Cimmerian · Feb 18, 2011

Thanks for posting this, very good read. I enjoyed hearing about Watson from a players perspective. My wife and I watched a couple of these Watson Jeopardy shows, which we found quite fascinating.

ronjor · Feb 18, 2011

Another interesting article somewhat on topic.

Mind vs. Machine

In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.

By Brian Christian
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/mind-vs-machine/8386/

JRViejo · Feb 18, 2011

IBM's Watson supercomputer, which shellacked Jeopardy's top human champions during airings of the game show this week, is powered by 90 servers and a network-attached storage (NAS) cluster with 21.6TB of data.

In the end, though, its brain only uses the equivalent of 80% of the processing power of a human brain.

Tony Pearson, master inventor and senior consultant at IBM, explained that Watson only uses about 1TB to process real-time answers to Jeopardy questions after configuring its back end storage as RAID, and then culling that data further to be loaded into the clustered server system's memory.
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Brain behind IBM's Watson not unlike a human's by Lucas Mearian.

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Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.

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