Do you remember Watson? He was the supercomputer built by IBM that challenged two of the greatest Jeopardy! contestants (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter) in the first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition. Watson was named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and is powered by a IBM POWER7 server, it is optimized to handle the massive number of tasks that Watson must perform at rapid speeds to analyze language and answer questions.
If you missed this historical moment of man vs. machine, Jeopardy! will be repeating the episodes September 12, 13 and 14, 2011.
“With the Jeopardy! challenge, we accomplished what was thought to be impossible – building a computer system that operates in the near limitless, ambiguous and highly contextual realm of human language and knowledge,” said Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow and scientist leading the IBM Research team that created Watson. “Watching the match again reminds us of the great power and potential behind Watson to be able to make sense of the massive amounts of data around us and to solve problems in new ways.”
Six months after the competition, IBM has been hard at work tweaking and collaborating with companies to use and incorporate Watson’s Question and Answering software in fields such as healthcare for more practical use, for example by processing large volumes of data so health care professionals can deliver a more accurate and faster diagnosis.
In the end IBM and the other contestants gave $1.25 million to charity, with $1 million coming from IBM. Now that my dear Watson, was very generous.