

IBM Watson: Overprovisioned “Big Iron”? - gojomo
http://memesteading.com/2011/02/16/ibm-watson-overprovisioned-big-iron/

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burke
First off, I think it's naive to assume it would be that easy to do as well as
Watson. Talk is cheap.

More importantly, though, Watson isn't /really/ about solving Jeopardy. It's a
more general AI designed to provide concise answers to arbitrary questions
posed in arbitrary natural language. I have absolutely no source for this, but
it's probably reasonable to assume that Watson has the most sophisticated
understanding of human language of any computer system to date. This is much
bigger than a quiz show.

~~~
gojomo
Indeed, talk is cheap. But no other team was even given a crack at this, nor
have I heard of any research groups trying (and failing) at similar trivia
tasks. Maybe we'll see that now.

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phaedrus
Then by all means build such a single-server Watson clone and program it!

I think you're underestimating the combinatorial explosion that occurs when
you try to do any kind of AI over natural language (and I speak from
experience). Though I get your point that it seems they haven't reduced the
big-O complexity of the problem; but what if it's irreducible?

In fact I do think eventually a smaller scale implementation of a Watson clone
will happen, and not just because of Moore's law. As Steve Wozniak said in a
forward to a book about the Apple 1, "Some very simple ideas are very hard to
do the first time." It seems to take a first execution to inspire the people
who will come after and find simpler ways to do it. Somehow just knowing that
it has been done is enough to set another inventor down the path of doing it
even better. This happened frequently in the field of steam engines and
thermodynamics in the 17 and 1800s, when just hearing about what one person
had done would lead the next person to leap frog it.

~~~
spitfire
Michael Abrash said something like Woz's quote also. Once you know it /can/ be
done it somehow becomes easier. Often the less you know the better you are.

Example, in his black book abrash tells a story about working at number nine.
Their got word that one of their competitors had put a FIFO buffer on one of
their cards (this was the ISA period 386 era). The staff at number nine
panicked. They were so close to being finished their design they didn't have
the space for a FIFO. So they put a single bit write FIFO in.

Then they taped out and went to market, praying they could compete. Then the
other card came out on the market.... with an 8byte read FIFO. At the time
video memory was /dead/ slow, so everyone designed their programs to never,
ever, ever read VGA memory. Instead you wrote to a virtual buffer and flipped
it to the screen.

The results, number nine absolutely creamed the competition for some time. And
people still didn't read VGA memory.

Moral: sometimes just knowing it can be done is all you need. and often too
much knowledge will send you down the wrong path.

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spitfire
Well, Watson was written in Java....

Seriously though, While you could write a simple wiki search engine to get
decent results right away I think IBM is playing the long game. Taking the
much more difficult (15 people 5 years) game for long term results. The
begining results like this jeopardy game don't seem that impressive, but if
the watson technology is as impressive as ibm make out I'm sure it'll broaden
in time.

On the other hand, I found the use of power chips over x86-64 a bit suspect.
That was clearly IBM sales at work.

~~~
gojomo
If another IBM engineer walked in on the Watson team and showed them his
single-server (32 core, 512GB RAM) alternative that performed on par with the
Big Iron approach, do you think IBM corporate's reaction would have been:

• "Great, now we can haul the unit to Jeopardy's Burbank studios for a
showdown ASAP!" ...or...

• "Hold that thought for the future, we've already frozen the datasheets and
shot lots of footage of the server room that's perfect for the show and
B-rolls."

~~~
spitfire
I agree with you. Don't change horses midstream. I think the choice to go with
power was flawed to begin with. But for better (financially) or worse they
decided to do that.

Mind you, several racks worth of computer always looks cooler. You'd be a bit
disappointed if Alex Trebek opened the rack door to find a 1u Dell inside.

~~~
mcav
I'm sure IBM would rather sell Watson-sized devices to businesses than a
single server.

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anonymois
Ah, the rise of the armchair computer scientist. Gentlemen, we have truly
arrived.

~~~
icandoitbetter
Well, he did search Google with the Jeopardy questions and showed that very
often the answer to the question was Google's first result. I think that's not
only indicative of the difficulty of the problem at hand, but also shows that
Watson is no different than established A. I. systems such as search engines.
I had never seen Jeopardy before (not being from the States) and expected the
game to be slightly more challenging; too many clues are included to the
question asked and they make it too easy to determine the type of the expected
answer ("this" appears almost in every single question). All three players
seem to know the answer to any given question, and it's just a game of who
presses the button first.

~~~
rayiner
"but also shows that Watson is no different than established A. I."

How does it show that?

