IBM’s celebrated supercomputer Watson will square off against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a first-of-its-kind competition to be aired over three nights in February.
The grand prize is $1 million; second place wins $300,000; third place receives $200,000. Jennings and Rutter have pledged 50 percent of their winnings to charity; IBM will donate all of its prize.During a demonstration round Thursday, Watson handily defeated the two Jeopardy champions.The IBM Jeopardy Challenge represents a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence, and is part of Big Blue’s centennial celebration.
Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the supercomputer is one of the most advanced systems on Earth and was programmed by 25 IBM scientists over the last four years.
Kelly said the lessons IBM learned from developing Watson would be applicable across industries, including law, business, and especially medicine.
“Watson can read all of the health-care texts in the world in seconds,” Kelly said. “And that’s our first priority, creating a Dr. Watson, if you will.”
Facts About Watson
- Researchers scanned some 200 million pages of content — or the equivalent of about one million books — into the system, including books, movie scripts and entire encyclopedias.
- The system is powered by 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 servers running Linux, and uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and can operate at 80 teraflops.
- That’s 80 trillion operations per second.
- Watson scans the 2 million pages of content in its “brain” in less than three seconds.
- The machine is the size of 10 refrigerators.
- Watson will go head-to-head with Jennings and Rutter in two matches, to be aired February 14, 15, and 16.
To Know More:IBM Watson Supercomputer
