Anyone else watch the super computer Watson challenge the mortals on Jeopardy?
LOL, the only question it gets wrong is the Final Jeopardy question which involves Toronto LMAO. FAIL!
Intangible
He has gotten a few wrong. Although last nights final jeopardy question was pretty funny.
I like that when he is uncertain he says he is making a guess.
He is absolutely killing the other two opponents - I think a lot of it has to with the fact he can process the clue so much faster and hit the buzzer so much faster. He also lacks any of the emotional challenges
But it's interesting to see where his Weaknesses are. He is oblivious to what's going on in the studio so once he repeated a wrong answer. And he seems to have a bit more trouble with some of the word play questions
I think it's interesting how he mathematically calculates what he will wager.
I love watching all the IBM guys geek out hard in the audience when he does something awesome.
Can't wait for tonight.
It's amazing what we could do with these piece of technology.
Yohan
ohnoes... skynet!
Pett
I think it's all incredibly lame
jon jon
quote:
Originally posted by Yohan
ohnoes... skynet!
lol exactly what I was thinking
Endlesswave
quote:
Originally posted by jon jon
lol exactly what I was thinking
Yep.
Also, some machine will never replace our capacity for creativity and imagination. ;) It's just pure computational power...
StereoPrincess
lol, i heard that Jennings guy was complaining that no one was cheering for him at the IBM studio. lol. they were all cheering for the computer.
man, must such to have less friends than a machine. maybe if ken wasn't such a douche, he would have some fans.
VDub
I find it interesting and ridiculous at the same time...
I even got Chicago right. I can't believe he guessed Toronto (not a US city my dear Watson)...
The ONLY reason he's beating them is because of that trigger. Does anybody know when the system registers the button? Is it a human who activates it after Alex finishes the clue???
Ok... There are two Toronto's in the States but neither of them has a major airport...
Intangible
quote:
Originally posted by VDub
I find it interesting and ridiculous at the same time...
I even got Chicago right. I can't believe he guessed Toronto (not a US city my dear Watson)...
The ONLY reason he's beating them is because of that trigger. Does anybody know when the system registers the button? Is it a human who activates it after Alex finishes the clue???
Ok... There are two Toronto's in the States but neither of them has a major airport...
A mechanical system presses the trigger which is activated when watson is confident in his answer
Orko
They are holding a viewing of the final episode tonight in the CBC building downtown. They have a large area set up, where IBM staff will go to watch it.
I'm not sure if most people understand the significance of this machine. It's not just something that recalls an answer. There is a lot of interpretation in Jeopardy, something we haven't been able to get right with computers before. Sure it has a huge database of knowledge, but so do the other guys. And arguably, the human players have more processing power than the computer does.
quote:
To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second
The computer giant IBM today unveiled a new type of computer chip that integrates both electrical and optical nano-devices on the same piece of silicon. This could soon make it possible for supercomputers to perform one million trillion calculations – or an exaflop – in a single second.
Such supercomputers would not only be a thousand times faster than today's most powerful petaflop machines, but for the first time would have the same processing power as the human brain, says William Green, a researcher at IBM's silicon integrated nanophotonics group at Yorktown Heights, in New York.
One of the main challenges in making super-fast computers lies in the ability to quickly transmit large amounts of data between chips, he says. But while optical fibres are much better at doing this than copper wires, components that convert electrical data into photons tend to only exist in separate off-chip devices. This means that data still has to flow through wires to reach them, which creates a bottleneck.
Light speed
But over the last four years IBM has developed a range of tiny photonic switches, waveguides, detectors and modulators, all of which are made out of silicon. And now for the first time these have been integrated into chips, so that the same silicon that makes up the electrical circuitry and transistors of the chip is also used to convey and convert photons, and channel them off the chip through thousands of waveguides, each just 500 nanometres wide.
Announcing the technology - called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics - at the SEMICON conference in Tokyo, IBM says that a single chip can transmit terabits per second of data from a single processing core. And since these photonic devices are made out of silicon they can be made using the same fabrication processes used to make the transistors.
Switching to silicon nanophotonics could greatly improve the speed and power consumption of computer chips, says Hiroshi Mizuta, head of the University of Southampton's Nano Research Group in the UK. "(Computing) performance is heavily limited by the interconnections," he says.
Shrinking chips
The nanotechnology will also allow the optical and electrical components to be integrated into an area occupying ten times less silicon than conventional components, says Green.
IBM hopes to use the technology to create powerful exaflop supercomputers within the next five years. But further into the future the technology could also find its way into high performance games consoles, to increase the flow of data between graphics cards and processors, he says.
