Could this be another leap for AI software?

[CryoDragoon]

Don't know whether this has been mentioned here on the forums already, but I'm gonna go ahead and post this anyway. This is too darn interesting to just let blow past ;p Recently, IBM (yup.. the same folks who did the Deep Blue vs Kasparov gig in 1997) recently came up with another challenge. They designed a system capable of processing natural language and answering questions posed in it. Named 'Watson', after IBM's first president, it had the following features: "Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor's massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watson's IBM DeepQA software which is embarrassingly parrallel (that is a workload that executes multiple threads in parallel)." It also had the equivalent to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage in total (yes, including the full text of wikipedia) and all that without being connected to the internet. Holy shite? Yes indeed... As for the challenge? It would participate in the game of Jeopardy alongside two of its all-time best human players. And how it ended, you ask? Watson bested them both, and received the first prize of $1 million, of which IBM readily donated 100%, divided between two charities, the first one being 'World Vision', a humanitarian relief organization, and 'World Community Grid', which uses spare computing power donated to it to help in projects dealing with, for example, AIDS and cancer research, in a huge public computing grid. I'm currently at university studying AI myself, so I got terribly excited when I saw this stuff. I thought it was absolutely amazing, awesome, and conjured a sheepish grin on my face for a long long time afterwards. Natural language processing, dealing with ambiguity, parrallel processing lines of algorithms, machine learning.. It made my insides tingle.. This might just be the first step towards a real-life EDI Whatever the case might be, I want one Anyhow.. Here are some vids (where you were all waiting for ;p): YouTube - Jeopardy! IBM Watson Day 1 (Feb 14, 2011) Part 1/2 (part one of the first day of the challenge) YouTube - Watson Jeopardy Full Final Game (Day 3 Feb 16) (day three of the challenge) YouTube - How IBM's Watson supercomputer wins at Jeopardy, with IBM's Dave Gondek (a more detailed look at how Watson works) YouTube - IBM Watson: Final Jeopardy! and the Future of Watson (the experience of the whole episode, what we have learnt and what the future may hold, from an IBM perspective) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gpaf...eature=related - a PBS documentary on Watson Aaand for more info, here are some useful pages: Watson (artificial intelligence software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia World Community Grid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia World Vision - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Sooo that's it.. Have fun viewing, discussing, and whatevering. Hope to see y'all alive and well when the robot overlords take over. Have a great day! -Tim