IBM demonstrates Watson supercomputer in Jeopardy practice match

We’re at IBM’s HQ in upstate NY, where IBM will pit its monstrous Watson project (in the middle buzzer spot) against two Jeopardy greats, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson has been in development for four years, and this is its first big public practice match before it goes on national TV in February for three matches against these giants of trivia. Unlike IBM’s Deep Blue chess project in the 90s, which was pretty much pure math, Watson has to deal with the natural language and punny nature of real Jeopardy questions. IBM, ever the salesman, has thrown gobs of its fancy server hardware at the project, with 10 racks full of IBM Power 750 servers, stuffed with 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor operating at a collective 80 teraflops. IBM says it would take one CPU over two hours to answer a typical question, so this massive parallel processing is naturally key — hopefully fast enough to buzz in before Ken and Brad catch on to the human-oriented questioning. We’ll update this post as the match begins, and we’ll have some video for you later in the day. Continue reading IBM demonstrates Watson supercomputer in Jeopardy practice match IBM demonstrates Watson supercomputer in Jeopardy practice match originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on January 13, 2011. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry