This post is an excerpt from "I'll Take Man Versus Machine for $200, Alex" - Jeopardy Champs Take on IBM Supercomputer.
Watson is the successor to IBM's Deep Blue, the computer that famously beat World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1987. But winning at Jeopardy is significantly more complicated than winning at chess (no offense to chess champions), as it involves a great deal more than simply understanding the next-best-move on a chess board. Watson needs to be able to understand the questions asked (or, rather, answers given), something aided by the 200 million some-odd pages of content that have been entered into its system. And it also has to be able to weigh which categories to choose and how much to wager in the final round.
Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux with 2,880 processor cores running at 80 teraflops and 15 terabytes of RAM. By comparison, Deep Blue ran at around 1 teraflop. It takes Watson less than 3 seconds to scan those millions of pages of content, and respond with its noticeably Hal-like voice.
