[dba-Tech] IBM Watson's numbers

Hi Jim

I don't know, but Lisp is a qualified guess. Or Prolog?

/gustav


>>> accessd at shaw.ca 02-03-2011 19:57 >>>
Do you know what language this server was using? Lisp?

Jim



-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com 
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 9:23 AM
To: dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com 
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] IBM Watson's numbers

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