IBM’s “Watson” Will Play another Jeopardy Match

IBM's Watson Supercomputer

On February 14^th, IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer will begin a 3-game match of Jeopardy against the top two human players in the game’s history. Jeopardy grand champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter already lost a brief fifteen-round match with Watson last month.

To create a computer capable of answering the often obscure questions posed in a Jeopardy game required not only a machine with software capable of real intelligence and the ability to learn, but also a machine with enormous computational and analytical speed.

The IBM software is known as DeepQA. Rather than storing volumes of potential questions and answers typical of the game, the software uses algorithms to understand the questions, and the references contained within, and then pulls from a vast 4 TB storage resource containing literature, thesaurus, dictionaries, historical data, etc. to answer the questions.

To win the match, however, Watson must be able to answer quickly. Even the DeepQA software would typically take hours to answer just a single question when run on a standard desktop computer. IBM’s solution was to interconnect 90 of its Power 750 servers, each containing 4 sockets of 8 core Power7 chips with 3.55 GHz processors. With the immense processing power, coupled with 16 TB of memory, this room sized supercomputer can typically come up with an answer in 2-6 seconds.