What is Watson?

[gaard]

The developers are also doing an AMA at reddit.com. AMA = Ask Me Anything

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f ... team_that/

[karger]

Here is what Watson consists of : Watson is made up of a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes)
# Watson has 10 racks, nine for the servers and one for the associated I/O, network and cluster controller nodes
# The Power 750 server was not specially designed for Watson. It’s commercially available and used by thousands of companies today.
# The Power 750 uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core
# Watson has a total of 2,880 POWER7 cores
# The POWER7 processor's massively parallel processing capability is ideal for Watson’s DeepQA software, which is 'embarrassingly parallel' (that is a computer science term used to describe a workload that executes multiple threads in parallel)
# The cluster has a total of 16 Terabytes of RAM. The file system containing all of Watson's data is on 4 Terabytes of disk.
# When Watson starts up, much of the data on the disk is loaded into memory and replicated across many servers in the cluster.
# In order to be fast, all of Watson's knowledge must be loaded into memory.
# Watson can operate at more than 80 Teraflops—that’s 80 trillion operations per second
# Watson uses Apache UIMA (which originated at IBM) to provide interoperability between its large number of different analysis programs, as well as to scale out the computation across the cluster
# UIMA does not answer questions, but supports building and scaling applications like Watson, providing standards for interoperability and scale-out of deep text and multi-modal (speech, image, video) analytics
# Watson's Power 750 servers are clustered over a 10 Gb Ethernet network
# Watson exploits POWER7 processors ultra-fast 500 gigabytes per second on-chip bandwidth
# Watson has two I/O nodes that attach SAS disk drawers with a total of 4 Terabytes of disk
# Like many other high performance computing workloads, Watson's DeepQA software runs on Power Linux

[Jouni]

I suspect human intervention, we need machine's log files

Jouni

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hello Mr. Watson,

oh yes, that's clear, means that one of the members has the same name.
Logical reaction

Best
Frank

[karger]

Watson was suppose to be on equal par with it's human opponents. The reason Watson beat the humans so bad is because it logged in with an answer using a solenoid activated device which depressed the answer button at the exact time the question was finished being stated. There was no lag in the time to log in to answer. The humans rang in before the question was done sometimes, which eliminated them from answering that particular question. Watson answered first almost every time because of the speed and precision and repeatability of electronic circuits. This was not a fair game whatsoever .

[Richard Allbert]

Do you think they'll let me run Jabba on it in CCT next year ?

[Terry McCracken]

This is Watson

In the off chance some missed it the link is embedded in the blue letters.

[Terry McCracken]

To the computer chess community:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_yXV22O6n4&NR=1

This computer learns and knows puns.

CCC has someone talking about IBM Watson almost 2 years ago.

In more related news, does computer chess software learn from a mistake that has a relatively decent time control and number of plies?

Jonathan Lee

Some programs have position learning.
Some programs have evaluation learning.
Some programs have book learning.

Do any have all three and are they any good?

Some have all three.

Evaluation learning via td-lamda and td-leaf are the least effective, from what I have seen (custom evaluation seems to do better).

Position learning is 100% effective if you hit the same position again (but this has a surprisingly low probability). Suppose (for instance) that you are playing a chess game and encounter this position:
[d]2r3k1/4ppb1/2P5/4P2p/2R3p1/1p6/1B4PP/5K2 w - -
Your chess engine makes a bad move and writes out a record that stores the correct value after the opponent's move. The odds that you are going to play this move again are basically zero, unless it is near the origin (in which case it is probably a book move).

Book learning is effective, but it gets poisoned if you run lots of blitz games. IOW, if you run nothing but correspondence time control with an ultra strong program, eventually you will get a nearly perfect book. However, it will take a very long time to get there.

The problem with blitz book learning is that a computer program can easily make a mistake because of a shallow search. The book gets updated with this new wrong answer. So the engine will avoid moves that have this move now flagged as bad, but potentially it is a good move.

My synopsis:
The only one of these strategies that actually work well in practice is book learning and the only way that book learning will work optimally is if you run at very, very slow time control and with a very strong engine.

Eventually, computers will become fast enough that blitz time control will safely update book learning, but I guess that this is still some years away.

I think that there is a long way to go before computers utilize chess statistics properly in learning and move selection. It is actually something that I am actively working on.

Thanks Dann, I suspected that's primarily how it works in practise.
Good Luck with your work!

[NATIONAL12]

Hello Mr. Watson,

oh yes, that's clear, means that one of the members has the same name.
Logical reaction

Best
Frank

By NATIONAL12 Date 2011-02-13 23:15 in the West,it is more polite to refer to to someone with their christian name.in this case Majid.i know i would be slightly annoyed if people who replied to my posts just said thankyou Watson.A small point i know and based on different cultures.please take no offence at this. Reply •Edit •Attach
By Harvey Williamson Date 2011-02-13 23:16 Cheers Watson, Reply •Report
By NATIONAL12 Date 2011-02-13 23:22 .thanks Williamson. Reply •Edit •Attach
By Harvey Williamson Date 2011-02-13 23:23 Reply •Report
By POSITRON Date 2011-02-13 23:31 Reply •Report
By keoki010 Date 2011-02-14 02:02 Where is Holmes? "I am afraid you have made a blunder . Do you want to think a bit more YES NO" Reply •Report
By TheHug Date 2011-02-13 23:22 Some how I get the feeling you don't like being called mister or sir either They say that it makes you feel old. WBCCC World Blitz Corr Chess Championship Reply •Report
By POSITRON Date 2011-02-13 23:33 Only really old feel old. I am of course very young Reply •Report
By TheHug Date 2011-02-13 23:35 Yes I still have my younger years a head of me You can check my birthday here for that. WBCCC World Blitz Corr Chess Championship Reply •Report
By NATIONAL12 Date 2011-02-13 23:41 dont care.i am older than most on forum. Reply •Edit •Attach
By POSITRON Date 2011-02-14 00:15 dont claim the title yet, there is some turtles around including me but better lets keep this teme until here Reply •Report
By NATIONAL12 Date 2011-02-14 00:19 i will be happy to get in top half dozen. Reply •Edit •Delete •Attach
By Banned for Life Date 2011-02-14 01:37 Maybe so, but remember this famous historical phrase?

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”

Well, in reality, it went:

Watson, get your lazy ass up here!

Please take no offence at this. In speculation we trust! Reply •Report
By NATIONAL12 Date 2011-02-14 01:47 i laughed my head off at this.be lucky Alan i follow all your posts. Reply •Edit •Delete •Attach
By Lukas Cimiotti Date 2011-02-14 08:42 Unlikely. Ass is an American word for arse Playchess handles: Rechenschieber, Victor_Kullberg Reply •Report
By Banned for Life Date 2011-02-14 19:45 I was not familiar with the term arse, so I googled it and came up with:

http://electricpulp.com/guykawasaki/arse/

This is from Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D, so it must be valid! In speculation we trust! Reply •Report
By dragon49 Date 2011-02-14 22:30 I took the test. This was the result:

My Score 11

5 to 15 “True”: You sound like a borderline certified asshole, perhaps the time has come to start changing your behavior before it gets worse.

The important thing to determine is, what caused the break away from the old English "arse" to the more American "ass?" Does "ass" sound more derogatory, or is it just faster to say? Reply •Report
By Uly Date 2011-02-15 10:15 I took it:

My score: 2

0 to 5 “True”: You don’t sound like a certified asshole, unless you are fooling yourself. "What matters in the life is the action, not the result!" Reply •Report
By Banned for Life Date 2011-02-15 15:04 Yes, you are probably fooling yourself...

I like tests where no matter what answers you give, you come to the same conclusion. In this case, the test tells you that you are certifiable and should buy the author's book for assholes like you! In speculation we trust! Reply •Report
By Uly Date 2011-02-16 03:35 > Yes, you are probably fooling yourself...


Besides being quick at pointing other people's mistakes, and making jokes and teasing that can get a bit nasty at times, but I have to admit, they are pretty funny, I couldn't find another point that applied. "What matters in the life is the action, not the result!" Reply •Report
By Banned for Life Date 2011-02-16 06:41 ok, but you should appreciate the fact that some Ph.D has spent the time to come up with an actual test for this condition. Perhaps this could even become a medical condition, like alcoholism, complete with support groups like AA. Hello, my name is BFL and I am a recovering asshole! In speculation we trust! Reply •Report
By Uly Date 2011-02-16 09:03 No more error pointing or snarky remarks? I wouldn't want to recover from my A2 condition! "What matters in the life is the action, not the result!" Reply •Report
By Felix Kling Date 2011-02-15 22:21 Edited 2011-02-15 22:26 >You secretly enjoy watching other people suffer and squirm.


What if I openly do that?

I got 4 points in the test But that depends on the situation, like "You feel surrounded by incompetent idiots – and you can’t help letting them know the truth every now and then." - that applies to some situations, while it's not true at my "work" (ie. university) And I simply had to click yes for some questions, because it was too funny Felix Kling
(Rybka webmaster) Reply •Report
By Vempele Date 2011-02-14 04:34 > in the West,it is more polite to refer to to someone with their christian name.in this case Majid.


It's kind of his fault when his handle is only "M ANSARI". But I guess you'd rather be called National than 12, too. down with apat Reply •Report
By NATIONAL12 Date 2011-02-14 07:25 yeh,i see what you mean,but most on forum by now know my name is paul watson. Reply •Edit •Attach
By Nick Date 2011-02-14 20:57 > my name is paul watson.


http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/n ... atson.html

A DATE WITH WATSON

"Watson is big, about the size of ten refrigerators. You’ll see him onstage in his air-conditioned glass server chamber, which contains his two thousand eight hundred core processors and fifteen terabytes of RAM. His database holds about two hundred million pages of information, or roughly a million books. He can’t hear; all the questions will be fed to Watson as text, at the same time Alex Trebek reads them to his human opponents. But he does speak, in a voice reminiscent of HAL from “2001”—a deliberate choice by IBM engineers, who do not want to pretend that Watson is human."

Reply •Report
By NATIONAL12 Date 2011-02-14 21:04 Reply •Edit •Delete •Attach
By Uly Date 2011-02-15 10:17 What about, "elementary, my dear"? "What matters in the life is the action, not the result!"

this was a joke on Rybka forum,which you missed.

[parrish]

I can't believe Jeopardy! didn't have a category about computers with A.I. (fictional or non) with answers from movies like War Games, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Terminator, Star Trek, etc.