IBM would like to remind you that they are still #1
February 24th, 2011Among all the buzz and noises generated recently by companies like Apple and Google, who brought wave after wave of innovation to the table, IBM had just stepped up the game. The research team at IBM have made a tremendous breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence as they introduced Watson in the game of Jeopardy!. Watson, a powerful question answering AI, “walked” out of the game with $1 million of winnings.
The buzz was generated even before Watson appeared on the show, anticipation was built up intensely due to IBM’s brand equity after the success of Deep Blue the chess-playing AI in 1997.
Presumably named after the IBM founder, Watson runs Linux with 15 TB of RAM and 2880 processing cores which enables him to run 1 million tasks simultaneously. For reference, a typical personal computer runs four processing cores, out of which two can run concurrently. Watson is named the Question Answering AI because his main functionality is to find the answers to…ANY question. He parses the English language into natural language, and uses extremely advanced searching algorithms to search for all possible answers, then eliminates based on his confidence given the amount of found evidence. In other words, Watson can not only give answers, but also back them up by telling you WHY. IBM envisions Watson to be the pioneer in opening a whole realm of possibilities in the medical field by reducing the time needed for physicians to solve their everyday problems.
IBM has traditionally been focused on a target market of industrial and commercial technology users; however, with Watson, the IBM team is expecting to take a leap forward in consumer technology. In the next few years, Watson, combined with IBM’s developing nanosystem technology, will be extremely affordable and mobile, making it THE next big consumer mobile device.