Sunday Morning Tech Crunch
So Much more than Elementary is Watson 
This morning I wanted to take some time and talk about Watson, you all know Watson, Watson is the IBM computer that recently beat out two humans on Jeopardy. All time money winner Brad Rutter, and Champ Ken Jennings took on Watson in a grueling match on live TV. After doing a little digging I just had to share what I found.
To start understand that Watson in not connected to the Internet. So the only information it has to draw from is from the over 200 million pages of text. However, what makes Watson so different from any other computer is that Watson is a natural-language processing supercomputer. Watson works by figuring out how words relate to each other. That is an amazing feat for a machine.
What makes up Watson
Watson is made up of 10 racks of IBM power servers, with 2880 processing cores, 15 terabytes of RAM, ( a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes). To give you a comparison my computer at home has 1.87GB of RAM. Watson calculates at a rate of 80 trillion calculations per second, and can scan and analyze the information in those 200 million books in about 2 - 3 seconds. That my dear Watson in amazing.
Going beyond Logic
Think about this, we all know that computers work on number based platform, things that are mathematical based formulas. The difference is that Watson calculates using human speech patterns. Take for example a math problem, 2 x 2 will always be 4, that is a mathematical equation, computers can get there every time, but what about I made a lot of dough (money) and I made a lot of dough (baking). The bark of tree as opposed to the bark of a dog. That Watson can differentiate between the two is just mind boggling.
Watson cracks a joke ?
Here is where the whole thing gets really interesting. During the practice round there were two categories on the screen, "A man, a plan, a canal...Erie!" as well as "Chicks dig me" Ken Jennings joked " I've never said this on TV..Chicks dig me for $300." The audience laughed at the joke, but absolutely roared when Watson chimed in "Lets finish up Chicks dig me". Was this a computer cracking a joke? Who knows, Fox news and a few others reported on this early on, but then it disappeared from the news. That is odd, think what you will.
Where does this take us
This could really change the way our world operates. Think about how this could be expanded on, help desks, customer hot lines, information centers, medical diagnostics...real estate? This completely changes the game as we know it, this is going to be the beginning of a whole new surge in computer technology and I for one am really excited about what comes out of this. This brings machines into the realm of temporal reasoning. A machine that can reason, and learn. If you watch the clip you see Watson "thinking", the avatar that represents Watson is orange as it thinks, and turns green when it has it's answer.
I don't know about you, but me, I am completely blown away....
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