Watson

Watson is in the center.

The three day Jeopardy IBM challenge is over. Watson the computer won easily. I am not surprised by the outcome. I was quite sure IBM made sure this computer would be successful before placing it on national television. Still it is an amazing feat,a piece of history as it were. I got to watch. I have seen the progression of computers throughout my life. I wasn't always aware of their significance however. As with a lot of things you grow up around you just take it for granted. Pocket calculators,no big deal but before that all we had was adding machines or an abacus. The original video game Pong was a computer and look where that has gone. I'm sure you have heard this before but it is an amazing fact. You have far more computing power in your laptop computer than NASA had when landing men on the moon. You can have more in your Blackberry as well.
You may recall IBM made a computer called Deep Blue that played chess. It was not successful in its' first attempts but eventually did defeat the worlds greatest chess masters. That was quite an accomplishment but strictly a mathematical problem. This newest computer Watson is a different animal altogether. Even though the questions must be imputed electronically it has the ability to understand the English language as spoken. It is not perfect. If you watched the show you saw Watson get some answers wrong altogether. Still it is a giant leap forward. The potential uses for this technology is limitless.
I am not a computer geek that can tell you how many tetra bytes Watson has or the processor speeds and that kind of information. From watching the show I know it uses a lot of Power750 servers,whatever they are. They showed an entire room full of this equipment along with a giant cooling unit to keep it running. I was reminded of the computers used during early spaceflight programs. They too took up entire rooms and in a least one case a small building. Now we can carry that much computing power in our shirt pocket. I am quite certain a computer equivalent to Watson will be much smaller in size within the next ten years or so.
All in all it was an impressive feat. I am happy to say I witnessed this event. Will we have computers with voice recognition and the abilities of Watson ? Sure we will it is just a matter of time. That is if Mankind can stop self destructing ourselves and the planet. I can't help but wonder what marvels await my Great Grand Children. Will they have the flying cars we have been promised ? Will they come to rely too heavily on the computer and its' responses. Like Spock on Star Trek will pure logic rule the day? I think not because you can not remove emotions from important issues. Or can you.