Watson is an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a “question answering” machine. Thesupercomputer is named for IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson.
The Watson supercomputer processes at a rate of 80 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second). To replicate (or surpass) a high-functioning human’s ability to answer questions, Watson accesses 90 servers with a combined data store of over 200 million pages of information, which it processes against six million logic rules. The device and its data are self-contained in a space that could accommodate 10 refrigerators.
IBM'sDeepQA software, which is designed for information retrieval that incorporatesnatural language processing and machine learning.
Speculations about Watson’s future uses are varied. Because the device can perform text mining and complex analytics on huge volumes of unstructured data, it could –- among other possibilities -- support a search engine with capabilities far superior to any now existing. In an interview during the practice round, an IBM representative evaded the question of whether Watson might be made broadly available through a Web interface. The representative said that the company was currently more interested in vertical applications such as healthcare and decision support.
To showcase its abilities, Watson will challenge two top-ranked players on “Jeopardy!”, the popular trivia show. In a practice round in January of 2011, Watson beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The Watson avatar sat between the two other contestants, as a human competitor would, while its considerable bulk sat on a different floor of the building. Like the other contestants, Watson had no Internet access.
In the practice round, Watson demonstrated a human-like ability for complex wordplay, correctly responding, for example, to “Classic candy bar that’s a female Supreme Court justice” with “What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?” Rutter noted that although the retrieval of information is “trivial” for Watson and difficult for a human, the human is still better at the complex task of comprehension. Nevertheless, machine learning allows Watson to examine its mistakes against the correct answers to see where it erred and so inform future responses.
What Watson can do:
Answer your customers' most pressing questions.
Quickly extract key information from all documents.
Reveal insights, patterns and relationships across data
How Watson answers questions
Watson analyzes unstructured data 80% of all data today is unstructured.
This includes news articles, research reports, social media posts and enterprise system data
Watson first needs to learn a new subject before it can answer questions about it
First Watson learns a new subject
All related materials are loaded into Watson, such as Word documents, PDFs and web pages
Questions and answers pairs are added to train Watson on the subject
Watson is automatically updated as new information is published
Then Watson answers a question
Watson searches millions of documents to find thousands of possible answers
Collects evidence and uses a scoring algorithm to rate the quality of this evidence
Ranks all possible answers based on the score of its supporting evidence