WATSON
The "Waiting for Superman" Director Made a Film for IBM About Ducks
Between "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman," Davis Guggenheim has probably become the country's most famous young serious non-fiction filmmaker. Now he's made a short film for none other than IBM. It features the voice of David...
Ones and Zeros 6/8/11: Recognize Your Friends with Algorithms and Tattoos
_A brain in a petri dish has a longer attention span than--oh, look a coronal mass ejection_ h3. ONE: Incredible Solar Blast Video ("NASA":http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/News060711-blast.html) h3. ZERO: Lady Tattoos 152 profile...
The Internet's Candid Conversation With Ken Jennings
Smited human representative and world record holding Jeopardy Ken Jennings participated in an "online discussion with Reddit":http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fwpzj/iama_74time_jeopardy_champion_ken_jennings_i_will/, known within the community as...
The Double Helix Was Discovered 58 Years Ago Today
58 years ago today, scientists James Watson and Frances Crick announced that they had determined the structure of DNA, the nucleic acid that contains our genetic blueprint. This BBC documentary takes us through 50 years of research from the...
What Some of Our Thoughtful Human Friends Think About Watson
h3. _Some thoughts from Sherry Turkle, Jason Silva, Ben Huh, David Weinberger, Ray Kurzweil, Kenneth Livingston, Zach Kanin, Rita King, J-Bot, Doug Rushkoff, Tim Hwang, Shane Hope, Paola Antonelli, Tim Wu, Stuart Watson_ Is anyone really surprised...
How Watson Learned to Speak
A year ago, Watson couldn't say the word "koala." Watch as his speech progresses thanks to the tweaks of IBM engineers, so that now we have a computer that can not only respond to the clue "Johann, can I borrow some sugar? In Weimar, Schiller's house...
When Kasparov Lost to Deep Blue: Video
Fifteen years ago, the best a computer could do was beat our greatest chess player at chess. The computer won the match 3.5 - 2.5 and Kasparov lost a chess match for the first time in his life. We understood how it worked: the computer could think...
Robots Better Not Mess With My Shows Again
I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’m assuming that I’m the only one who DVRs Jeopardy, so if you missed the trifecta of Watson episodes this week, you’ll probably never see it anyway. Well, in a surprising turn of evens, Watson, the super computer...
George Plimpton: Nope, Supercomputers Still Can't Manage Baseball Teams or Counsel Marriages
When he learned that Garry Kasperov lost to Deep Blue, back in '97, George Plimpton wasn't nervous. He was certainly not about to cede his manly manliness to a computer, simply because it won a stupid game of chess. As he told "PBS":http://www.research...
A Computer Named Watson Won Jeopardy: Video
IBM's Watson computer won Jeopardy last night against its two most successful human players. While Watson cooled off underneath the special Jeopardy stage IBM built for the purpose of showing off their storied new brand name, the audience could be...
Welcome, Our New Computer Overlords
After yet another convincing defeat, Ken Jennings, the winningest human Jeopardy player of all time, could be seen wringing the mock neck of Watson's avatar. The machine had prevailed, having left its human contenders with nary a chance or a hope.
Watson's Hardest Question: "What Is Life?"
Here’s a possibly little-known piece of trivia: the company that built a computer that could beat humans at Jeopardy was born long before the modern computer. Back in the 1880s, it was known as the confluence of three companies, the Tabulating...