Jeopardy: IBM Watson Supercomputer vs Ken Jennings/Brad Rutter

by NowPublic Staff | February 14, 2011 at 03:16 pm

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Valentine's Day Jeopardy Match Up: Watson, IBM Supercomputer vs. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter

"Feeling Luck Human?" That may well be the question that Watson, the IBM Supercomputer will ask as it takes on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

The grand prize is $1 million; second place wins $300,000; third place receives $200,000. Jennings and Rutter have pledged 50 percent of their winnings to charity; IBM will donate all of its prize.

For the 25 IBM scientists who spent four years gearing Watson up for Alex Trebek’s scrutiny, tonight is the culmination of a labor of love. Powered by 90 IBM Power 750 servers, Watson uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and can operate at 80 teraflops, or 80 trillion operations per second, according to the company.

This is not the first time Watson will make an appearance on Jeopardy. During a demonstration round in January, Watson easily beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the supercomputer is one of the most advanced systems on Earth and was programmed by 25 IBM scientists over the last four years. Researchers scanned some 200 million pages of content — or the equivalent of about one million books — into the system, including books, movie scripts and entire encyclopedias.

The Watson vs Jennings and Rutter Jeopardy match up starts Monday night and concludes Wednesday.