jeopardy

For months, IBM's "Jeopardy" champion computer Watson has been a major PR win for the company, and tonight, its lead developer was awarded Big Blue's highest technical honor.

At a ceremony in New York, CEO Samuel Palmisano celebrated Watson team leader David Ferrucci and seven other employees as IBM's newest Fellows. The eight new Fellows join a group of just 209 previous winners, among whom have been the creators of technologies such as DRAM, the scanning tunneling microscope, Fortran, and relational databases.

And while the other seven 2011 winners include scientists and innovators who have … Read more

An IBM supercomputer named Watson has made headlines for the past month for its ability to defeat the most successful human champions from classic game show "Jeopardy"--but it looks like one New Jersey congressman, Rush Holt, got the better of Watson in a round of the game in Washington, D.C., last night.

"I played a full round against @IBMWatson tonight and was proud to hold my own: the final tally was Holt $8,600, Watson $6,200," tweeted the Democratic Congressman, who has represented New Jersey's 12th district, a section of the middle … Read more

"She likes things with big batteries."

These were the words that propelled IBM's Watson from cold, calculating machine to charming talk show guest on "Conan" tonight.

Watson hadn't even broken a sweat in defeating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two inferior human beings, in a faintly silly game show.

Appearing on "Conan," though, gave Watson the chance to show his frilly underskirts.

Who likes things with big batteries? Why, Conan sidekick Andy Richter's wife.

"I can love," Watson offered to Richter's question as to whether he is able … Read more

It was all over bar the pouting.

Still, Watson, the IBM supercomputer that wishes to put the sheen into machine, tried to be human. This, in the final round of the IBM Jeopardy Challenge, proved largely beyond his program.

Watson had decimated the human race in Round 2, posterizing his opponents with an array of slam dunks.

In Round 3, try as he might, he couldn't buzz slow enough or make his metal-headed intuition poor enough to lose to human "Jeopardy" greats, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Even though Watson had no clue that Slovenia was now … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--I'm going to just come out and admit it--I was rooting for the humans.

By "humans," of course, I mean Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two men who on the one hand are the greatest champions in the history of "Jeopardy" and who on the other just ended up getting their butts handed to them at the game by a computer that didn't even seem to know that Toronto isn't in the United States.

In case you were somehow in a cabin in the mountains with no Internet access and … Read more

Correction at 12:04 p.m.: After this story was published, we heard from PBS producer Michael Bicks that it was not, in fact, Watson that crashed during the show's taping. He would like to make clear the following: "I missblogged last night--It was not Watson, but the system that was the interface between Watson and the Jeopardy computer, completely separate from Watson, that crashed during the taping."

It's been a little difficult coming to terms with the end of civilization.

Watching IBM's Watson last night make spaghetti bolognese out of the silent lambs of … Read more

I have an idea for a new TV show. Two men stand, almost in silence, while a machine talks in a monotone and shows the world how clever it is. Will it sell? Perhaps that depends on the ratings for Part 2 of IBM's Jeopardy Challenge. Hollywood loves to copy.

Tonight's episode showed that IBM's Watson supercomputer--and the highly paid engineers who made Watson what he is--had merely been toying with the humans yesterday.

Those few errors IBM's Watson committed in the first of three "Jeopardy" shows against former champion Ken Jennings and Brad … Read more

IBM's Watson debuted for a national prime time TV audience last night on CBS' Jeopardy. Well, to be accurate, his avatar glowed behind his center-stage podium. He did however have a real button to push when he was ready to tee up a Jeopardy-formatted question-as-answer. The button was activated by a specially designed application running within his offstage IBM POWER7 server cluster, complete with IBM Scale-Out NAS (SONAS) storage.

From my perspective Watson was truly amazing during the first 15 minutes of the show, giving responses and choosing the next question category with blinding speed. Human contestants Brad Rutter … Read more

Last night, IBM's "Watson" supercomputer competed against the top human competitors on "Jeopardy" to test Watson's ability to use artificial intelligence in the context of the English language.

Represented by a lighted blue avatar, Watson performed well against quiz game champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, finishing the first round with a tie against the latter at $5,000. It did this with the help of 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, although like everyone else we wonder if the speed at which Watson can "press" a buzzer is fair to the other contestants.

Either way, this sounds like the exposition for an unwritten Roland Emmerich movie starring Will Smith, so start loading up your ID4 viruses.

Howard Stern's "Private Parts" aired on HBO last weekend, and the King of All Media himself pulled a Tang and liveblogged behind-the-scenes commentary throughout the showing. In addition to answering questions from fans, Stern also talked about his co-stars, revealed details about specific shots, and even dished about adult film star Jenna Jameson's antics onset.

Stern's arrival on Twitter is an obvious move, although it took him a while to jump on the bandwagon--the star joined the Twitterverse on February 3, the same day he defended David Letterman's honor and galvanized his crew on "The Late Show."

Stern's incendiary approach to celebrity gossip and media makes Twitter an apt medium for speaking to his more than 270,000 followers. The Lord of Fart Manor can be found at @HowardStern.

Next on the show, we discuss Gawker and Facebook's recent site redesigns. The Internet is giving a cold shoulder to the Gawker network after it debuted an app-style blog layout last week.… Read more