IBM's WATSON PLAYS JEOPARDY

Remember when IBM's Deep Blue played chess against Kasparov in 1997? This year, the excitement is building for Watson's appearance (if you can call it that) on Jeopardy Feb. 14-16. Watson is a Question Answering (QA) system that runs on IBM's fast (3.55 GHz processors) POWER7. I'm sure they won't be dragging the actual computer to the Jeopardy studios!

To give an idea just how powerful a computer needs to be to compete with not just anybody off the street, but actual Jeopardy winners -- the POWER7 cluster running Watson has 2,880 cores (90x32 3.55 GHz core) and 90x 256GB RAM. I compare that to my Toshiba laptop with the T2300 1.66 Ghz processor and 1 GB RAM.

Watson, powered by IBM POWER7 (credit: IBM)

I read an interview about how Watson works at this page.

Luckily for me, the interviewer asked my question ...

How well would Watson do on the Turing test at this point in time?

Dr. Eric Brown of IBM: Whenever I get that question, my initial response is: If you were to rephrase the Turing test slightly, and couch it in terms of, if you had two players playing Jeopardy!, and you couldn’t tell which one was the computer and which one was the human, and that was the Turing test, then I think Watson would pass that very easily. But, of course, the Turing test is defined more broadly and open-ended, where you really have an open-ended dialogue, and Watson is not up to that task yet.

By the way, Watson will compete against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, million+ dollar winners. See http://www.facebook.com/ibmwatson and/or Google IBM Watson Jeopardy for links to many fascinating web pages about Watson/POWER7 and the upcoming shows.