Reference no: EM131130235

INSTRUCTIONS ::: Please give this student a response and feedback on their answer to the question. Please give information that is useful rather than just saying i agree or disagree. Provide college level support. Must be at least 275 words

How powerful is Watson? Describe its technology. Why does it require so much powerful hardware?

IBM's goal project for Watson was to develop an effective set of techniques for computers to use and process the language of human beings. Watson was able to register the intent of questions and search through millions of lines of text and data, pick up a meaning and context in under three seconds. Watson's hardware consisted 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, 15 terabytes of random access memory, and 2800 processor cores which operated at 80 teraflops. This was equivalent to 6000 top end home computers. Watson used this amount of power to quickly scan its huge database of information including the internet. On February 2011 Watson made history by defeating the two champions of the Jeopardy game show. To prepare for Jeopardy IBM researchers downloaded over 10 million documents, including encyclopedias and Wikipedia, the internet movie database, and the entire archives of the New York Times. All of this data sat in Watson's primary memory, opposed by a slower hard drive in order to find the data it needed within three seconds. Watson was able to learn from its mistakes and its successes. In order to solve a typical problem Watson would use many algorithms to evaluate the language used, gather information, and generate hundreds of solutions. It then learned from its mistakes on which are the right answers and generally improved over time. The Watson version used in Jeopardy took 20 IBM engineers three years to build. Which resulted in and 18 million dollar labor cost, and 1 million dollars of equipment.