How did IBM's Watson destroy two of the greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time?
A computer that understood puns, wordplay, and double meanings took on the best human quiz minds ever - and it wasn't close.
The answer
On February 14–16, 2011, IBM's Watson competed on Jeopardy! against the show's two most successful champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and won decisively with $77,147 versus Jennings' $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600. Watson processed natural language using over 100 different algorithms running in parallel on a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers with 2,880 processor cores and 16 terabytes of RAM. The system analyzed 200 million pages of content, including all of Wikipedia, in under three seconds to generate answers. Jennings famously wrote under his Final Jeopardy response: 'I for one welcome our new computer overlords.'
Source: IBM Research
- ibm watson
- nlp
- question answering
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