Cross-posting some random thoughts about IBM's Watson appearance on Jeopardy to CD-LUG & MHV-LUG:
- That was pretty much a three night IBM commercial. You couldn't get any better publicity, good move. - When you see Watson being rack after rack of servers, for an old-timer like me who remembers the mainframes, it's still kind of a shock. - You wonder if the OS was AIX, their version of Unix, or something else. - Clearly they had everything indexed and in core, but you wonder what the database architecture was: - relational as in some version of DB2, or hierarchical like IMS or even XML, or a linked list, or something built one-off for this like Google's "Big Table" - The real magic of the thing was not the rapid retrieval of the keywords, but the scoring algorithms. Still, how could it answer Toronto when the category was "US cities?" That's kind of a problem, I'd say. - The only time it really got embarrassed was when it repeated a wrong answer that another contestant had just said. I know it couldn't "hear" or "see", but they should have had some mechanism whereby it would know what was answer (really question since it's Jeopardy) was just given. - Yes it was a little hypey, and all the bugs were not worked out, and it's just a beginning in a way, but that was the closest thing to HAL 9000 that I've ever seen, so good for them. It was great fun to watch, very entertaining, and I hope they don't put Watson in the bin like they did with Deep Blue, the chess computer. -- Frank L. "Cranky Frankie" Palmeri, Risible Riding Raconteur & Writer “The blues is my business, and business is good.” - Etta James _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Mar 2 - MHVLUG 8th Anniversary - Show and Tell Apr 6 - Introduction to IPv6 May 4 - Inkscape
