Computer wins at Jeopardy. Sort of.

[Tony]

There's a video up of one of the preview rounds for Watson, who is due to compete for real in February. More fascinating than I thought it would be, maybe because of the split screen that shows Watson's confidence and second and third choices.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE

[LFE]

They had a practice round with the new one already and Watson won.
- It was unable to answer questions about kids books... but still managed to beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Worth adding to this is that IBM is donating 100% of its winnings to charity and both contestants already agreed to donate 50% of theirs.
Wanna know what kind of computing power it takes to beat Ken and Brad (if they happen to lose)? Well, here ya go:
What’s in Watson?


Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 systems
Watson runs the Linux operating system
Watson contains 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores
Watson can operate at 80 teraflops per second – 80 trillion operations per second