Riobard's wournal of adventure and long-windedness

I must admit, watching Watson gives me a huge nerdgasm.

Seriously, I’ve dreamed about building Watson for a long time.

Well, not Watson. I never dreamt of creating a Jeopardy! playing machine. But I’ve always been fascinated by the world of AI… and I’ve also been fascinated by really expensive and incredibly powerful hardware. (The entry level POWER7 hardware, just one small piece of what makes up Watson, costs about $7,000USD.)

Sadly, AI has always disappointed me, too. Talking with Cleverbot or A.L.I.C.E is painful. Yes it can do some clever tricks, like sing a song with you… but its blindingly obvious that it has no idea what you’re talking about.

I would be grinning from ear to ear right now if I had helped develop just one of Watson’s many data-crunchin’ algorithms. He is an amazing machine.

Watson, and IBM, have definitely inspired me. Will I work on a giant computing platform, creating a realtime AI to compete on a popular quiz show? Probably not.

But a guy can dream, can’t he?

What blows my mind about Watson isn’t that he can play in the winner’s cloud… and it isn’t that he uses 14TB of RAM… and I’m not at all impressed at his large domain of knowledge. I’m impressed by the fact that in several years, Watson may very well fit in a package the size of a deck of playing cards.

Some see this as a “loss for humanity.” — But it’s exactly the opposite, Watson is one of the biggest “wins” we’ll see in a while!