A Not so Elementary Watson

Or I’ll take 3 pounds of grey goo for $1000, Alex

This week International Business Machine (or IBM for short) faired its Watson supercomputer in a Jeopardy! match against former Jeopardy! grand champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In short the computer won.

Watson is a supercomputer. Represented at his Jeopardy podium by an avatar on a flat-screen and a voice eerily reminiscent of HAL 9000, the real Watson was in a server room next door. Consisting of several racks of dozens of IBM servers each. The total area of Watson takes up about as much room as four standard sized book cases. But to make Watson work he is housed in a special climate-controlled server room that feels something like a meat locker if you were to walk in there. All in all Watson would fill up the area of a very nice sized living room.

According to IBM’s Watson website:

Operating on a single CPU, it could take Watson two hours to answer a single question. A typical Jeopardy! contestant can accomplish this feat in less than three seconds. For Watson to rival the speed of its human competitors in delivering a single, precise answer to a question requires custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and thousands of POWER7 computing cores working in a massively parallel system

That’s a lot of effort just to be able to compete with three pounds of grey goo that comes as standard equipment on every human. And your brain is a lot more portable than Watson.

As Jennings said in his final Jeopardy response: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords” (borrowing a line from “The Simpsons”). But are the computers taking over? Has Watson had an original idea yet? The answer is likely “no”. While Watson can filter an incomprehensible amount of data in to a few probable answers in just a few seconds, but Watson has no creativity. Like a desktop calculator, your iPhone or Amazon.com's "recommended for you" Watson knows only what he is told, and cannot formulate his own thoughts. That is where humans still hold the advantage.

That being said, had Jennings bet enough to best Watson in final Jeopardy would Watson eventually send a cyborg back in time to kill Jennings’ mother?

Riot like an Egyptian!

This morning I heard "Walk like an Egyptian" on the radio on my way to work today. On top of that, last night I watched the HBO documentary on Reagan. I guess stuff from or about the 80's just makes me feel good. So with all apologies to the Bangals I present to you my latest song parody:

Riot like an Egyptian

In the old Cairo town square
People are gathering, you know
It's a protest (Oh whey Oh)
They say Mubarak's got to go

From the Pyramids to the Nile
They're fed up with the prez'
Democracy? (We don't know?)
30 years and nothing's changed.

Protesters light the fires and say
'Ay Oh Whey Oh, Ay whey oh'
Riot like an Egyptian!

Protesters got their signs
Written in perfect English
You scratch your head (Oh whey Oh)
Who is really behind all this?

All the prices are going up
Why all this inflation?
It’s a perfect in (Oh whey Oh)
For the Muslim Brotherhood

Everyone in Mumbark’s regime stays Away
Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh
Riot like an Egyption

Turn on your phone And try to Tweet
There’s no internet, try Facebook
Mubarak turned it off (oh whey oh)
Telecoms brought it back

Rioters outnumber all the cops
Been replaced by the Army
Protesters go on (oh whey oh)
Bomb the embassy down the block.

All the media with their scripts
Can’t seem to get a handle on this
It’s not like Iran? (oh whey oh)
Sharia is going Egyptian

All the Muslim chicks in their covered dress say
Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh
Riot like an Egyptian
Riot like an Egyptian