WATSON

"IBM Watson" redirects here. For the laboratory, see Thomas J. Watson Research Center 



Watson's avatar, inspired by the IBM " smarter planet " Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM 's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson. In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy! , in the show's only human-versus-machine match-up to date. In a two-game, combined-point match, broadcast in three Jeopardy! episodes February 14–16, Watson beat Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings , the record holder for the longest championship streak (75 days). Watson received the first prize of $1 million, while Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter received $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble responding to a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed by the television screen. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage, including the full text of Wikipedia Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game.

Watson is a question answering (QA) computing system built by IBM. IBM describes it as "an application of advanced Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval , Knowledge Representation and Reasoning , and Machine Learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering " which is "built on IBM's DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring." According to John Rennie, Watson can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second. IBM's master inventor and senior consultant Tony Pearson estimated Watson's hardware cost at about $3 millionand with 80 TeraFLOPs would be placed 94th on the Top 500 Supercomputers list, and 49th in the Top 50 Supercomputers list. According to Rennie, the content was stored in Watson's RAM for the game because data stored on hard drives are too slow to access. The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies, and ontologies. Specifically, DBPedia, WordNet , and Yago were used. The IBM team provided Watson with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material that it could use to build its knowledge. Although Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game, it contained 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage, including the full text of Wikipedia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Obm0DBvwI