[Cyborg] Watson supercomputer plays Jeopardy

[Andy Isaacson]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 01:52:30PM -0500, Eric Boyd wrote:
> Specs: Watson is a Linux system that is powered by 10 refrigerator-sized  
> racks of IBM POWER 750, with 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor  
> cores.  That's some serious hardware, and apparently the software is  
> equally serious, with hundreds of state-of-the-art AI algorithms running  
> in parallel to both understand the question and find the answer.  It has  
> 200 million+ pages of text source material to work from, and takes about  
> 3 seconds to crank through everything each time.

There's a minimal Wikipedia page at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_%28artificial_intelligence_software%29

but the real document to read is

Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project
http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2303

which is behind a paywall... luckily Stanford republished the PDF at

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/AIMagzine-DeepQA.pdf

-andy