Watson

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system which answers questions posed in natural language,developed in IBM's DeepQA project by principal investigator David Ferruci and a research team. Watson was named for IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson. The program operates on POWER7 processor-based systems.

In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!, in the show's first and only human-versus-machine matchup. In a two-game, combined-point match, which was broadcast in three Jeopardy! episodes broadcast from February 14–16, Watson bested Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship series. Watson received the first prize of $1 million, while Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter received $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Jennings and Rutter pledged to donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM divided Watson's winnings between two charities.

In the match, all contestants, including Watson, had to wait until host Alex Trebek spoke each clue entirely, then a light was lit as a signal; the first to activate their buzzer button won the chance to answer. Although Watson suffers from cognitive deficiencies when analyzing the clue's contexts, it typically activated its button faster than its opponents. Watson also only had trouble answering a few categories, such as short clues containing only a few words. For each clue, Watson's three most probable answers were displayed by the television screen. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of hard disk storage, including the full text of Wikipedia. Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game.
- source wikipedia

Grand Challenges serve as a way for the computer science community to explore the limits of what computers can do. These challenges push the boundaries of computing and lead to industry transformations that make our planet smarter.

The next challenge? A computer that can understand and respond to human language that will change the way we interact with machines. Watson, the IBM system designed to play Jeopardy!, represents a breakthrough in language processing and analytics. Watson will be playing against two of the most well-known and successful Jeopardy! Champions - Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter - in a two-match contest to be aired over three consecutive nights beginning on February 14, 2011 on US TV.

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Watson represents the future of systems design, where workload optimized systems are tailored to fit the requirements of a new era of smarter planet solutions.

Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and DeepQA technology to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds.

Watch the video (03:01min) featuring Dr. Dave Ferrucci, principal investigator for the IBM Research team responsible for building Watson, as he and other IBMers talk about how Watson’s DeepQA technology exploits the massive parallelism capability of POWER7 processors.

Program Description

"Watson," an IBM computing system, is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge—taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent."

On February 16, 2011, two AI experts from Carnegie Mellon University, Tom Mitchell and Eric Nyberg, live-blogged and answered viewer questions here during the final of three consecutive Jeopardy! shows in which Watson challenged top human competitors Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.