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IBM's Watson, explained to you like you're five

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From the "imagine a very, very, big Angry Bird" department:
Title: IBM’s ‘Watson’ supercomputer explained for beginners
Author: Piunika
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2014 09:29:48 -0500
Link: http://mylinuxbook.com/ibm-watson-supercomputer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ibm-watson-supercomputer

IBM Watson[1] is a super computer with artificial intelligence that makes it
capable of answering questions baffled in natural language. It is named after
IBM’s founder Thomas J.Watson. This computer system was specifically designed
to answer quiz questions in Jeopardy!( Jeopardy! is an American television
show featuring general knowledge based quiz competition ) and it successfully
smashed humans in the game. The supercomputer won first prize of $1 million
with its highly impressive replication ability to answer questions, just like
humans.

How Watson Worked in Jeopardy

In the game Jeopardy! all players wait for the host to read the clue before
answering. Once the clue is read, players must press buzzer button for
winning the chance to respond. In case of Watson, the computer received clues
as electronic texts, and as soon as it was ready with the answer, it
activated the buzzer. Clues were provided to Watson at the same time when
they were read to humans, but Watson continuously proved its efficiency to
search the correct answers through its algorithms, and that too more quickly
than humans.

Key Components

Watson accesses over 90 IBM Power 750 servers, 200 million pages of
structured and unstructured data including full Wikipedia text exhausting 4
terabytes of disk storage, 2880 processor cores, 16 terabytes of RAM, Apache
UIMA frameworks, Apache’s Hadoop, SUSE Enterprise Linux server, 11, 500
gigabytes of preprocessed information, and IBM’s DeepQA software. Watson
processes at the rate of 80 trillion floating-point operations per second.

Technology and Future

Science behind Watson is its aptness to understand and learn natural language
which brings machines closer to human beings. One superlative character of
Watson supercomputer is that it works on feedback and learns from its own
experiences for the future improvement like humans learn.

IBM announced[2] an investment of more than $1 billion to create the Watson
Group, a new business division to promote the supercomputer’s commercial use.
It will soon be introduced in health care system, shopping malls, and more.
Watson can transform health-care by complete and accurate diagnostics.

As per a recent estimate, one in five patients is diagnosed inappropriately,
Watson can help medicine to make processes more efficient as it leaves no
space for human error. Watson can help banks for solving financial challenges
by its better analyses and error solving skills. Similarly Watson can be
introduced to many fields where intelligence and accuracy is required.

Good Reads

* Smarter Than You Think – What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?[3]
* IBM Watson: How the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer was born, and what it
wants to do next[4]

The post IBM’s ‘Watson’ supercomputer explained for beginners[5] appeared
first on MyLinuxBook[6].

Links:
[1]: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ (link)
[2]: http://www.techspot.com/news/55283-ibm-forms-new-watson-business-unit-invests-1-billion.html (link)
[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (link)
[4]: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-watson-the-inside-story-of-how-the-jeopardy-winning-supercomputer-was-born-and-what-it-wants-to-do-next/ (link)
[5]: http://mylinuxbook.com/ibm-watson-supercomputer/ (link)
[6]: http://mylinuxbook.com (link)

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IBM's Watson, explained to you like you're five RS Wood  <rswood@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-25 09:56 +0000

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