Man vs App on Jeopardy tonight.

[Ghoulish Delight]

So here's something I've been trying to figure out, but haven't seen anything that explains it. How does Watson understand what the categories mean. Especially the punny type categories. Does it have some definition of the kinds of puns and clue structures that Jeopardy has? Does it try to figure it out from the title? Or does it just ignore it and go purely from question content.

Judging from what we saw tonight, I'm guessing option C. Compare Watson's performance in the "APB" category to the decades category. It kicked butt in the APB category since, while the clue structure was weird, it was chock full of keywords and had very straight forward answers. Just plug in the keywords, voila, answer. Whereas the decade category, just plugging in the keywords that are in the clue would perhaps bring up a bunch of dates, but wouldn't lead directly to answering in the form of a decade (and indeed, on a few of them, the Watson display showed it wasn't even considering a decade as an answer).

So, if that's the case, I'm more impressed that it's really trying to figure out the KINDS of answers that it should be looking for, rather than just being fed the category definitions. Nifty!

And they never show enough detail on the server racks on these things. What kind of storage are they using? What about networking. I presume the servers are clustered, and using 1GbE, but is there a separate storage network. Fibre channel? iSCSI? Infiniband? (hahahaha.........okay, I'm the only one who thinks that's funny)

[Moonliner]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

And they never show enough detail on the server racks on these things. What kind of storage are they using? What about networking. I presume the servers are clustered, and using 1GbE, but is there a separate storage network. Fibre channel? iSCSI? Infiniband? (hahahaha.........okay, I'm the only one who thinks that's funny)

Here is the best source I've seen so far on the underlying hardware.

Assuming it's not a typo, Watson has 4TB of storage (the same as my home PC) and 16TB of memory.

Originally Posted by SomeGuy

Watson is made up of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage. Davidian sontinued, “This is enclosed in ten racks including the servers, networking, shared disk system, and cluster controllers. These ninety POWER 750 servers have four POWER7 processors, each with eight cores. IBM Watson has a total of 2880 POWER7 cores.”

Makes sense I suppose, putting everything is RAM is the only way to get the response time you need. I bet it takes a serious amount of time to boot Watson from a cold start.

[Moonliner]

WTF! The final jeopardy question was leaked, I'm thinking the fix is in.

Spoiler:

Commonly know as a CAPTCHA what two phrases are used here to test computer users?