IBM Watson Update

During the three years since the Jeopardy match on TV, Watson has become 24 times smarter and faster, improved performance by 2,400%, and is 90% smaller. IBM says it has shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to the size of three stacked pizza boxes.

IBM says, "What we believe is happening right now, is that the amount of information being produced in the world is overrunning the ability of humans to consume it. When these kinds of things have happened in history, new tools emerged that helped humans deal with scale, such as in the industrial revolution." "I think as we look at knowledge-based professions today — health care, law, teaching — they're all being overrun with information. It's very difficult for people to keep up — and that leads inventors to come up with ways to help humans deal with that overload."

Watson and Cancer

Not quite robot technology, but IBM and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center are adding the latest in oncology research, and the hospital's accumulated experience to Watson's vast knowledge base, and keep updating it. They said the result should help the hospital diagnose and treat cancer more quickly, accurately, and personally. "The capabilities are enormous," said Dr. Larry Norton, deputy chief for breast cancer programs at Sloan-Kettering. "And unlike my medical students, Watson doesn't forget anything."

If successful, the finished product could be used anywhere in the world to aid cancer treatment.

Watson won fame by beating the world's best "Jeopardy!" players. Last year Watson also began work for the health insurer Wellpoint Inc.

Worlds Fastest Computer

The fastest computer in the world belongs to the Chinese. The Tianjin National Supercomputer Center's Tianhe-1A system benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops (A petaflop is 1,125,899,906,842,624 calculations per second - a thousand trillion or quadrillion), surpassing the U.S. Department of Energy's Cray XT5 Jaguar system at a slow 1.75 petaflops. IBM is building two mega machines, a 10 petaflops and a 20 petaflops system, both to be running in 2012. We are approaching the Singularity faster than predicted.

A human brain's probable processing power is around 100 teraflops (100 trillion calculations per second), according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. We do have one edge over computers, they have not been able to build a computer that fast as small as our brain. . .  yet.

Less than forty years ago, we were wondering when the computer would be able to do a million operations a second. Less than three years ago we hailed the fastest computer for running teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).

BTW, IBM's Watson, of Jeopardy fame, runs at a miserably slow speed of 80 teraflops.