IBM Super Computer takes on Jeopardy Champ

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.

Building a toaster from scratch... Really.

Google Science Fair Experiment - Extended

Google is looking for the brightest, best young scientists from around the world to submit interesting, creative projects that are relevant to the world today.

In partnership with:

Can Science catch up to Art? Soon...

Icon Sets: HQ Freebies

This post is an excerpt from 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets - Smashing Magazine.

In fact, designers make use of it, creating absolutely amazing icon sets and offering them for free download. The result: hundreds and hundreds of sets available almost everywhere, usually not that well executed and often duplicated from other sets. However, there are indeed free high-quality icon sets. And this post is supposed to prove exactly that.

Solid Video Encoder (FREE)

This post is an excerpt from Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows.

MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL.

Art Online: An awesome Collection

This post is an excerpt from Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Art & Music Resources to Try in 2011.

The Museum of Modern Art offers a sizable collection of online resources for teaching art lessons. Part of that collection is a series of lesson plans, but there are also collections of art for students, an art game for young (5-8 years old) students, interactive activities for older students, and podcasts about art and artists. The MOMA lesson plans collection can be searched by theme, artist, medium, or subject. If the lesson plans in the collection don't offer quite what you're looking for, MOMA has free resources you can use in developing your own plans. MOMA offers many images and PDFs that you can use in developing own lessons and or slideshows.