In today’s world where men are trying to build machines that can defeat men, they’ve sure come a long way. From simple video games to actual machines physically interacting with people, humans have always wanted to create something smarter and better than them. IBM has always been one of the forerunners of such technology. They were the folks behind Deep Blue, the supercomputer that actually gave Gary Kasparov a run for his money (though it’s been rumored that the machine cheated), and now they have created the robot that can compete in the infamous game show, Jeopardy! The supercomputer has already competed against other human in a practice round and it effortlessly beat its opponents. Here’s how Wired describes the machine:
“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. Watson scans the 2 million pages of content in its ‘brain’ in less than three seconds. The system is not connected to the internet, but totally self-contained. The machine is the size of 10 refrigerators.”
I smell a clean sweep at the taping of the upcoming episode. Do you think the humans stand a chance?
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