

IBM working on Watson app for smartphones - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/135173-ibm-working-on-watson-app-for-smartphones

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tocomment
Does anyone know what it is about the Watson algorithm that requires a super
computer? Sure they say it's searching billions of documents, but I'd be happy
with a scaled down version that just searches Wikipedia.

If it doesn't have to win at Jeopardy couldn't they make a good enough version
running on something more quotidian?

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sp332
If you just want to search wikipedia, why use Watson?

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tocomment
Because I want to search wikipedia using natural language.

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sp332
It looks like the most popular (or maybe just hyped) NL search engines for
wikipedia are now down, PowerSet and AskMeNow. This one still works
<http://host.expertsystem.it/wiki/Default.aspx> but it's a little slow.

To answer your first question: Watson doesn't just search, it tries to
understand all the information. It runs several hundred different algorithms
in parallel and then weighs each of them for relevance. That said, you could
get away much less hardware. For example, during the game the entire database
was held in 16 TB of RAM because disk accesses were considered too slow. It
had to beat Jeopardy champions in 3 seconds or less.

