Man vs Machine: Jeopardy!

While Apple, Google, Facebook and twitter are grabbing eyeballs and even credited for toppling regimes, IBM is quietly building a machine that can play Jeopardy! (to win some prize money to offset the dismal sales ...) Watson made its official debut yesterday and played a game of Jeopardy! with two of the most celebrated contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. According to pcmag , Watson has specifications like below:

• 90 IBM Power 750 servers enclosed in 10 racks
• 16 Terabytes of memory
• A 2,880 processor core
• Linux system
• While not officially disclosed by IBM, Watson is estimated to have cost $1-$2 billion
• Uses "DeepQA": a technology that enables computer systems to directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge

All of these are just (futile) attempts to match the human brain which according to IBM researchers can fit inside a shoe box and is powered by a tuna sandwich.

The result of the three-day contest is a well guarded secret. But my bet is Watson will win on the third day.

More on Watson from Big Blue.