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When someone says artificial intelligence what comes to
mind? Terminator? Skynet? World destruction? Well that hasn't happened (yet)
even though artificial intelligence has existed since the 1940's. A handful of
scientists came together to discuss the possibility of an artificial brain,
capable of calculations, decisions, etc. Well 70 years later, we have a
somewhat intelligent, but in no means crude, computer simply called, Watson.
Watson is an artificially intelligent (AI) computer system that
can answer elaborate questions. IBM developed Watson to show that AI can exist
and is on the right track. Their main focus of Watson was to appear on the
popular quiz show "Jeopardy!", in which it beat two previous winners
of the show.
What's powering Watson? A cluster of 90 IBM power 70
servers, each of them containing 3.5 POWER7 GHz eight core processor, with four
threads in each processor. That amounts to a whopping 2,880 POWER7 cores
capable of processing 500 gigabytes per second. It also had 16 terabytes of
RAM. That’s 16,000 gigabytes!
Watson wasn't allowed to access the internet during the show
so instead had to store all 21.6 terabytes of its data. Now that
might not sound implausible, but that was strictly text, which uses very little
data. So when a question was asked, Watson was fed in the text of the question
and had to analyze it, generate a hypothesis, find and score evidence, and then
output what it thought, all within seconds. This is why the computing power of
Watson was needed to search through the huge catalog of text that was stored.
Watson is a big step for the AI community withits
capabilities. The hardware and software used behind it is staggering! I hope
this post gives you an idea of how much time and money, those processors aren't
cheap, is needed to develop AI.
Interesting post. I was quite surprised when I heard about that jeopardy game. I would have never thought that a computer could ever be able to beat 2 seasoned jeopardy pros. Watson had some really crazy specs too, I wish I had that much ram! I do have one minor complaint though, and it is that you did not really go into detail about what an AI is, and what the end goal for the field of artificial intelligence is.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this, and your flow and tone throughout the post. I've learned a bit in reading about Watson as I had only briefly heard of it's capaabilities, and really enjoy the more in depth knowledge. I like how you referenced sources for further study/reading, adn hope to read more from you soon.
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