watson

IBM's Watson debuted for a national prime time TV audience last night on CBS' Jeopardy. Well, to be accurate, his avatar glowed behind his center-stage podium. He did however have a real button to push when he was ready to tee up a Jeopardy-formatted question-as-answer. The button was activated by a specially designed application running within his offstage IBM POWER7 server cluster, complete with IBM Scale-Out NAS (SONAS) storage.

From my perspective Watson was truly amazing during the first 15 minutes of the show, giving responses and choosing the next question category with blinding speed. Human contestants Brad Rutter … Read more

Last night, IBM's "Watson" supercomputer competed against the top human competitors on "Jeopardy" to test Watson's ability to use artificial intelligence in the context of the English language.

Represented by a lighted blue avatar, Watson performed well against quiz game champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, finishing the first round with a tie against the latter at $5,000. It did this with the help of 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, although like everyone else we wonder if the speed at which Watson can "press" a buzzer is fair to the other contestants.

Either way, this sounds like the exposition for an unwritten Roland Emmerich movie starring Will Smith, so start loading up your ID4 viruses.

Howard Stern's "Private Parts" aired on HBO last weekend, and the King of All Media himself pulled a Tang and liveblogged behind-the-scenes commentary throughout the showing. In addition to answering questions from fans, Stern also talked about his co-stars, revealed details about specific shots, and even dished about adult film star Jenna Jameson's antics onset.

Stern's arrival on Twitter is an obvious move, although it took him a while to jump on the bandwagon--the star joined the Twitterverse on February 3, the same day he defended David Letterman's honor and galvanized his crew on "The Late Show."

Stern's incendiary approach to celebrity gossip and media makes Twitter an apt medium for speaking to his more than 270,000 followers. The Lord of Fart Manor can be found at @HowardStern.

Next on the show, we discuss Gawker and Facebook's recent site redesigns. The Internet is giving a cold shoulder to the Gawker network after it debuted an app-style blog layout last week.… Read more

Watching IBM's Watson supercomputer make its debut tonight on "Jeopardy," one thought dominated: why, oh, why did they make him sound like Hal's diffident nephew?

This was the future freaks' big chance to make themselves acceptable to the human race. This was national television.

Watson had been created by human beings who pride themselves in their ability to teach a machine, rather than a child, to be as smart as they are. So why did they not think about giving Watson a little character? A shock of long, green hair, perhaps. Oversize purple ears would have … Read more

If you're anything like me, you've fantasized about being a contestant on "Jeopardy"--how you'd write your name in the name box, how much you'd wager on a Daily Double, and how you'd awkwardly banter with Alex upon your introduction. Last week I got to live my dream of playing a full "Jeopardy" game--and to make the situation even more amazing, I got to do it against Watson, the famous IBM supercomputer.

In segments to be aired starting today, Watson--which boasts nearly 3,000 Power7 processors and 16 terabytes of memory and has the ability to compute more than 30 billion operations per second--will take on "Jeopardy" champs Ken Jennings (the winningest champion in the "Jeopardy" history) and Brad Rutter (the biggest money earner in the show's history, with more than $3.2 million).

Watson trained for its game show stint in its own faux "Jeopardy" studio at IBM Research's Yorktown, N.Y., facility. That's also where I had my chance at "Jeopardy" stardom.

Turned out Watson's a formidable challenger, having been fed massive amounts of information from a range of thesauri and encyclopedias, plus the Bible. And since a "Jeopardy" answer has to be deduced in around three seconds, Watson's response rate is lightning-fast.

Indeed, Watson rang in with blazing speed on every question posed to us--ranging on topics from international sports trophies to laundry detergent to fashion to tennis vocabulary--which gets frustrating when you actually know the answers. … Read more

Computers that reliably understand human communications have been a staple of fiction going back decades or more. The Enterprise's computer in the 1960s vintage "Star Trek" series is as good an example as any. And truth is, that particular science-fictional ability probably would not have seemed all that remarkable to the typical person of the time.

Access billions of pages of text, pictures, and video from a gadget I can fit in my pocket? Play a game with immersive graphics on a huge, high-resolution screen that hangs on the wall? For a computer engineer, the fact that … Read more

Nokia and Microsoft make an intriguing pairing of two companies that frankly need each other more than ever. Apple is working on a cheaper and smaller iPhone and Obama wants 4G to blanket the US. Plus, Donald Bell joins us to flick cockroaches with our monkey toes.

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y.--The first words publicly spoken by a talking computer named Watson were, "WHAT IS JERICHO?"

Watson was following the rules. Like any contestant on game show "Jeopardy," the IBM Research-built machine was required to phrase his answer in the form of a question. And Watson was playing "Jeopardy." More specifically, it was a test run this morning at IBM Research's headquarters in preparation for a televised weekend challenge against famed "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and Watson nearly shut out those champions in a category … Read more

When you consider mashing up supercomputers and games, there's little doubt that many people think of IBM's Deep Blue Grand Challenge project--which beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a famous 1997 showdown--as the standard by which all future projects would be judged.

Now, IBM is trying to outdo itself with Watson, another supercomputer Grand Challenge that, this time, will attempt to beat the world's most successful players of the long-running hit TV game show "Jeopardy."

And while "Jeopardy" might not be the first game show to cross your mind as being worthy … Read more

Alex, I'll take Big Brains vs. Big Iron for $1 million.

Last year, we got word that Watson, a program powered by an IBM Power7 server, might be competing against superstars from the TV quiz show "Jeopardy." Now, it's settled. Watson will face "Jeopardy" standouts Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition scheduled to air February 14-16. Two matches will be played over three consecutive days.

Watson is named after company founder Thomas J. Watson and optimized to quickly analyze clues for complex language such as subtle meaning, irony, and riddles, IBM said in a statement announcing the contest.

Jennings won more than $2.5 million during his record 72 consecutive "Jeopardy" wins, and Rutter is the show's biggest winner with more than $3.2 million. The computer program took and passed the same contestant test that humans take to qualify to be on the show and has competed in more than 50 "sparring games" against former Jeopardy Tournament of Champions contestants.

Watson trained for its "Jeopardy" stint at IBM Research's Yorktown, N.Y., facility. There, the institution built a faux "Jeopardy" studio and sucked in huge amounts of content from the show trying to program a new computer to learn how to beat the best. … Read more