In February of this year, IBM's supercomputer Watson will take on Jeopardy giants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a special television event of the trivia game show. IBM and Jeopardy gave a teaser of that match today, running through a practice round with the three contestants. The match remained close, but ended quite quickly - Watson ran first throughout the match with Ken Jennings in pursuit and Brad Rutter struggling to keep up. The speed with which they rattled through the categories was amazing; these guys really know their stuff, and the speed with which Watson calculated possibilities was absolutely amazing. Watson is apparently housed in ten racks full of IBM Power 750 servers. It has 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores, able to complete its large variety of algorithms to come to an answer within three seconds. Watson is not connected to the internet, as that would be "cheating." Apparently, the techs at IBM have been "teaching" Watson for months through past Jeopardy questions, feeding it random bits of trivia and the nuances of the English language. Watson is able to "learn" which algorithms to trust the most for specific question types. Honestly, I'm pretty excited for this show to roll around. It'll be pretty exciting to see how quickly the three rattle off answers; we'll see if silicon will take on the human brain. You can find a video of the match and an interview with one of the IBM techs here.
