Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Wed Mar 2 11:22:41 CST 2011
Hi Arthur Another point of interest is the fact that this machine is the closest we yet have come to good old HAL9000. As you recall (I'm sure you do), it was able to understand the spoken word and read from lips as well (this feature is still missing), and output was the spoken word too. Also - and that was quite interesting when watching the Jeopardy show - Watson displayed how confident it/he was when supplying an answer (a question). The same did HAL9000 when it analysed some possible defect to be caused by a probably upcoming malfunction of a certain power supply (which conclusion the crew didn't trust and then the drama begins ...). Someone wrote that Watson could and should be used for medical diagnostics. Combine it with a future scanner as that used in Aliens and you can scan and diagnose a patient in a minute. Combine that with the robotic surgery already present ... some perspective indeed! /gustav >>> fuller.artful at gmail.com 02-03-2011 17:19 >>> Here are the basic numbers on IBM's Watson computer, world Jeopardy champion. 15 TB of RAM 1870 processor cores 80 teraflops per second (80 trillion) Actual size of the data used is less than 1TB Each Power7 processor can handle 32 simultaneous tasks -- 8 cores, 4 threads per core. If you have to ask how much, you can't afford it. Arthur