By now, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the news that IBM’s computer, Watson, bested two of the greatest human champions of the game show “Jeopardy!” Even though Watson blundered on one question on the first day, and mishandled the Final Jeopardy question on the second day, it has demonstrated that it can successfully compete with the two most successful players the show has ever seen. Any of us would lose to either of them.
The question is: What’s under Watson’s hood? IBM isn’t saying much about the technical side of things, except that the company built the computer “on commercially available POWER7 systems [which] ensures the acceleration of businesses adopting workload optimized systems in industries where knowledge acquisition and analytics are important.” Some are calling it a “super search engine.” But Watson’s success is a fine reason for me to tell you more about what IBM has said about Watson, and to explain the concept of “concept search.”
