Watson at Jeopardy - A Race Of Machines ?

The new Computer Overlords – A Race Of machines Or The Rise Of the Machines ?

Just a collection of Links – There are lots of blogs and videos and I thought of collecting them in a single place.

Let me know when you find interesting links :

• Updates:
  • [Feb 28,2013] Chef Watson ! Interesting NYTimes Article
  • [Feb 3, 2013] Watson is making waves in the healthcare industry. Interesting …
  • [Feb 9, 2013] Now there are 6 Watsons !
• Book Review : Stephen Baker’s “Final Jeopardy”
• First a little philosophy on what we are :
  • A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans
    • The epilogue says it all – “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them,”
  • And The New Yorker says
    • “Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos, and we mostly live by those.”
    • Or is it “”Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.”
• NOVA – Smartest Machine On Earth
• Watson’s Visual Identity [Blog]
• Jeopardy, IBM and Wolfram | Alpha [Link]
• Watson Schematic – Good interactive visualization of it’s internals !
• Dissecting IBM Watson[Link]
  • 90 IBM Power 750 servers / 10 racks / 16 TB Memory/ 2,880 cores / Linux / Estimated cost $1-$2 Billion [Pictures from Time]
  • And NLP Of course,…
  • Watson is not connected to the Internet.
  • Of course, it is part of IBM Research’s DeepQA project
  • But it has Hadoop ! Jeopardy Goes Hadoop [paper] And uses Apache UIMA
  • The questions that it did best at are ones that if you entered into Google or Bing, you can get the same answers.
  • Watson was marvelous at coming up with “cut and dried” answers … but it seemed to falter though at those “nuanced” questions so prevalent in Jeopardy!
  • And it cannot hear, so repeats wrong answers from other contestants
  • No matter how a product fares, there is always a healthy respect for the sweat and ingenuity that developers, engineers and computer scientists put into the products
• YouTube Video ~25 min : Building Watson – A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project
  • “Watson does suck in large corpuses of text, but it doesn’t just search through: it uses natural language processing to construct sets of semantic relationships between words in different contexts.”
  • “It’s also capable of (to use the designers’ phrases) temporal reasoning, geospatial reasoning, and statistical paraphrasing. Watson also does a lot of meta-learning; it figures out which of its approaches tend to be useful for particular kinds of questions.”
• Dataset & Storage
  • Some insights on the storage – here , here & detailed here
  • Works off of 15 TB of RAM
  • Dataset – 1 TB, replicated in subsets in memory
• Watson’s FJ wagering strategies include Two-Thirds Betting and Shore’s Conjecture
• Book On Watson – Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
• Jim’s AI Blog with lots of videos on Watson
• The Aftermath
  • And finally interview with Ken Jennings and an opinion on the new computer overlords !
  • The question now is not can but when computers pass the Turing Test [Link]
  • Watson still can’t think !
  • Time’s 10 Questions for Watson
  • [Update Feb 23,xi] Interesting Blogs
    • 3 Ways Watson Manifests the Future of Search
    • 10 Things You Need to Know About the Technology Behind Watson
    • Humans vs. Watson (Programmed by Humans): Who Has The Advantage?
    • Why Watson and SPSS are IBM’s big data Ying & Yang
• Of course, while you might not be able to buy one, you can build one !
  • IBM Watson – How to build your own “Watson Jr.” in your basement
• Watson plans to say “Yes, Doctor” ! One is coming near your doctor ! [Another article]
  • Watson at HIMSS
• Or may be this is all a farce and there is actually a wizard behind the Watson !

Updates:

• CTOEdge [1][2]
• IBM’s Watson Data Sheet (here) via Highscalability’s January 6th, 2012 roundup