Watson Said What?!!!!

What do you get when you mix an urban language dictionary with a supercomputer?  Yep, a foul "mouthed" computer.  At least that is what happened to Watson, IBM's supercomputer.  

It seems that Eric Brown, Watson's "dad" at IBM  wanted to make Watson's conversations to be more "human" in their context.  To accomplish this Brown's team loaded the English language Urban Dictionary into Watson.  

The computer had no problem absorbing the dictionary, but the trouble started when Watson began to pepper its replies with rather profane remarks.  One researcher's inquiry was met with one word from Watson "bullshit".   It seems Watson has no way to differentiate between polite and profane so the only thing the team could do was remove all the dictionary data and install a filter to prevent a 

recurrence.   Brown also revealed that this is not the first time this problem has crept up.  Watson picked up a similar bad habit after reading through Wikipedia. 

Now that is just plain funny!

Tech2 article 

Sequoia Topples K

IBM's Sequoia has replaced Japan's K as the fastest computer in the world.

The Sequoia uses 1.5 million processors to establish a benchmark speed of 16.32 petaflop/s which bested K Computer's 10.51 petaflop/s.

For those of you that would like to know what a mind blowing speed 16+ petaflops a second is - a petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or, to over simplify it a bit a quadrillion is 10 with 15 zeros after it or 10 million billion and Sequoia is doing 16+ basic mathematical operations of these. Can't hardly say the number let alone comprehend it.

In the BBC New article, IBM said that to put a bit more understanding to the number:

• Sequoia was capable of calculating in one hour what otherwise would have taken 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they had worked non-stop.

Also according to the article:

• Sequoia will be used to carry out simulations to help extend the life of aging nuclear weapons, avoiding the need for real-world underground tests.

Also not only is Sequoia faster than K but is also 150% more energy efficient using  7.9 megawatts to K's  12.6. 

WIKI article here