Watson

IBM's Deep Blue computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.   Now the company is taking on the champions of the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy.

At a practice round this week at IBM's Watson Research Center in Westchester County, New York, IBM's Watson system - a Power7 computer using Watson Question Answering artificial intelligence software, defeated Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.  Watson will face off with Jennings and Rutter again on the televised Jeopardy program this February 14 - 16, kickstarting IBM's Centennial this year.

Watson has a lot under the hood.   The room-sized system is powered by 10 racks of 90 IBM Power7 servers using 360 chips, runs on the Linux operating system, and has 15 terabytes of RAM .  Over the last four years, Watson has been boning up for its Jeopardy run with encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, news and movie scripts - the equivalent of 200 million pages of content. Watson is not connected to the Internet, so it does not do Google-like web searches to find answers.  And it "clicks" its own Jeopardy buzzer.

The media have been making comparisons between Watson and the HAL 9000 computer in Arthur C Clarke's 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, published with the release of Stanley Kubrick's film.  Rumor had it the HAL name was a clever one-letter shift from IBM.  In the film sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, Clarke dispelled that through the character Dr. Chandra, who said this idea is "Utter nonsense! I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic."

Last week Watson's principal inventor David Ferrucci was asked about comparisons to the Hal 9000.  "That's science fiction. We're not even close to that."  He did add that Watson was inspired more by the benevolent computer on the TV series "Star Trek" than by Hal. "Watson tries to help you."