History of Computers - Watson
Watson is a super computer created by IBM, [1] specializing in analysis of human language and the answering of difficult questions. IBM created this computer to work towards computers being able to understand and respond to human language.
Overview
Watson is comprised of both hardware and software. Running programs written in Java and C++[2], Watson is made up of 2880 POWER7 processor cores, as part of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers that have 16 terabytes of RAM. Each of these power servers are powered by 3.6 GHz eight core processors.[3] Watson's software is a natural language processing program called DeepQA that IBM claims can understand a human sentence, and is supposed to break the barrier of human and computer connections.[4]
Significance
This computer was the first of its kind. Not only was it able to communicate and answer the questions that it was asked with ease, but it completed the job that IBM set out to do, which was to break the communication barrier between humans and computers. This computer also beat the top 2 contestants of Jeopardy at their own game which brings up the inevitable question: will computers eventually always be smarter than humans?
