Hasta La Gadget!

So, in February IBM’s Watson will be in an official Jeopardy tournament-style competition with titans of trivia Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. That competition will be taped starting tomorrow, but hopefully we’ll get to know if a computer really can take down the greatest Jeopardy players of all time in “real time” as the show airs. It will be a historic event on par with Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov, and we’ll absolutely be glued to our seats. Today IBM and Jeopardy offered a quick teaser of that match, with the three contestants knocking out three categories at lightning speed. Not a single question was answered wrongly, and at the end of the match Watson, who answers questions with a cold computer voice, telegraphing his certainty with simple color changes on his “avatar,” was ahead with $4,400, Ken had $3,400, and Brad had $1,200.

Alright, a “win” for silicon for now, but without any Double Jeopardy or Final Jeopardy it’s hard to tell how well Watson will do in a real match. What’s clear is that he isn’t dumb, and it seems like the best chance the humans will have will be buzzing in before Watson can run through his roughly three second decision process and activate his buzzer mechanically. An extra plus for the audience is a graphic that shows the three answers Watson has rated as most likely to be correct, and how certain he is of the answer he selects — we don’t know if that will make it into the actual TV version, but we certainly hope so. It’s always nice to know the thought processes of your destroyer. Stand by for video of the match, along with an interview with David Gondek, an engineer on the project.

Update: Video of the match is up, check it out after the break!

Update 2: And we have the interview as well, along with a bit more on how Watson actually works.

Continue reading IBM’s Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy practice round (video!)

IBM’s Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy practice round (video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

If you can’t tell your DRAM from your STT-MRAM, you’ll need to bear with us for a sec: IBM’s figured out the math required to read and write data from the spaces between magnetic fields, racing across a nanowire, at hundreds of miles per hour. IBM’s been plugging away at the so-called racetrack memory since 2004, calling it the perfect hybrid of magnetic storage and flash, but until recently scientists didn’t know whether the magnetic domain walls (where data will live) had any mass to speak of. As it turns out, they do, and thus have to obey the tiresome laws of physics as they move along the nanowire “track,” but also accelerate and decelerate the exact same amount, more or less canceling out the effect. Long story short, IBM can use this knowledge to precisely position those 1s and 0s in their newfound data bank, and someday we’ll all reap the benefits of dense, speedy and reliable memory. You know, assuming PRAM, FeRAM, ReRAM and memristors don’t eat IBM’s lunch. PR after the break.

Continue reading IBM makes racetrack memory breakthrough, which could come in handy someday

IBM makes racetrack memory breakthrough, which could come in handy someday originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 11:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Their names are emblazoned on electronics all over your home and office, but what did companies like Nintendo, Motorola, Sony, IBM, and HP produce before digital cameras, PCs, and cell phones were invented?

We’ve taken a look at some of today’s top tech companies before they started making what we all know them for. The list includes tires, playing cards, radios, and even comic books.

The path to exascale computing is a long and windy one, and it’s dangerously close to slipping into our shunned bucket of “awesome things that’ll never happen.” But we’ll hand it to IBM — those guys and gals are working to create a smarter planet, and against our better judgment, we actually think they’re onto something here. Scientists at the outfit recently revealed “a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light (instead of electrical signals), resulting in smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies.” The new tech is labeled CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, and if executed properly, it could lead to exaflop-level computing, or computers that could handle one million trillion calculations per second. In other words, your average exascale computer would operate around one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today, and would almost certainly give Garry Kasparov all he could stand. When asked to comment on the advancement, Dr. Yurii A. Vlasov, Manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at IBM Research, nodded and uttered the following quip: “I’m am IBMer, and exascale tomfoolery is what I’m working on.”*

*Not really, but you believed it, didn’t you?

IBM breakthrough brings us one step closer to exascale computing, even more intense chess opponents originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PC World  |  IBM  | Email this | Comments

Continue reading ‘Steeper’ project aims to boost electronics’ power efficiency by 10x, eliminate vampire power

‘Steeper’ project aims to boost electronics’ power efficiency by 10x, eliminate vampire power originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Reuters  | Email this | Comments