Tag archive: Watson

IBM's Watson supercomputer successfully stomped out its human competition, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, during a three-round Jeopardy! battle way back in February. Despite the much-talked-about win, however, the high-powered machine still can't land a good job. According to Hemispheres magazine (the one you flip through on Continental Airlines flights), Watson may soon be tasked with answering customer service calls. Essentially,… Read More

Nintendo's upcoming console has had a lot of rumored names and codenames. Some call it Project Cafe; some call it Wii 2; others believed it might have a simple name: “Nintendo.” However, we've now learned its true name: Wii U. The Wii U is Nintendo's next generation videogame console, a true successor to the Nintendo Wii. This makes it Nintendo's sixth home gaming console since 1985 when it launched the NES.… Read More

So it turns out that 74-time “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings is ridiculously hilarious. He may have recently lost at “Jeopardy!” to IBM supercomputer Watson, but Jennings firmly secured his place as the world's greatest geek yesterday by posting an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) interview to Reddit.com. Thousands of questions from Reddit users poured in, and Jennings (aka “WatsonsBitch”) answered… Read More

In an informal round of Jeopardy, IBM’s infamous Watson took on the United States Congress. And if anything, the spar should comfort Americans that we have at least one very smart man in government. While various lawmakers were able to hold their own against the supercomputer, only New Jersey representative Rush Holt was able to best the machine. Holt happens to be more of a Jeopardy veteran than Watson is. He is a five-time champion of the… Read More

It didn't take long for IBM's demonstration of the question-answering prowess in the Jeopardy-winning Watson system to find some backers: IBM has announced a deal with Nuance Communications to apply Watson's Deep Question Answering technology the healthcare field. The research partnership will also address one of the key shortcomings Watson demonstrated on Jeopardy, combining Watson's analytical skills with speech… Read More

After three hard-fought nights of trivia play, Jeopardy!'s IBM Challenge has come to an end. It seemed to be almost a certainty at the end of round two that thinking computer Watson would wipe the floor with human competitors Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and it did just that last night. The bloodbath really happened on Tuesday, the end of the two-day first round, when Watson emerged as the victor with more than double the winnings of its… Read More

Round two of the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge continued last night as past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter returned to face off against the trivia-spouting supercomputer, Watson. The first round ended with Rutter and Watson tied at $5,000 and Jennings trailing at $2,000. Last night's showdown played out very differently as the IBM creation pulled far ahead of its meatbag competitors over the course of the episode. Despite making a few… Read More

Watch out, world. Skynet could be just around the corner. Chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov lost a match to an IBM super-computer in 1997, but the chess-playing Deep Blue has nothing on IBM's latest artificial intelligence competitor to human dominance, Watson. Following a January test run, the AI program made its official debut on the popular quiz show Jeopardy! last night, the first of a three-night showdown between the machine and two of… Read More

Its may only have been a practice match, but Watson has proven to be a serious competitor to the likes of Jennings and Rutter. Watson is IBM's Jeopardy-playing supercomputer. And Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — both Jeopardy champions — served as human competition today during a preliminary Jeopardy match with the machine. IBM took four years to develop the supercomputer so that it would be capable of mastering the subtleties of… Read More

It's been over a year since we last heard from Watson, IBM's in-house supercomputing project designed to be a question-ansewring system rather than a mere search engine: the idea behind Watson is to take an actual question, expressed in everyday vernacular, and pull up the actual answer to that question, not just a list of resources where it thinks related information might be available. Now, word comes from the New York Times that… Read More

IBM has famously developed systems that have taken on the grandmasters of chess—and given them a pretty serious run for their money, defeating world champ Gary Kasparov back in 1997. Now, IBM is going after the big bucks with Watson, a new question-answering system that will compete on long-running U.S. television quiz show Jeopardy. Watson will not only have to understand the questions put to it in real time on the show against human… Read More

“In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes. The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the… Read More

Debra Baker tells people she has TiVo. But she really doesn't. The 33-year-old New York tax consultant has a variant – a digital video recorder offered through her cable company. She didn't know what “DVR” stood for until then. “I thought DVR was Time Warner's name for TiVo,” she said. So, like many others, Baker simply uses the leading DVR brand as the catchall term for the new love in her… Read More

A flaw in the most widely used protocol for sending data over the Net–TCP, or the Transmission Control Protocol–was addressed by most large Internet service providers during the last two weeks and presents little danger to major networks, said Paul Watson, a security specialist for industry automation company Rockwell Automation. If left unfixed, the weakness could have allowed a knowledgeable attacker to shut down… Read More