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Then by all means build such a single-server Watson clone and program it! I think you're underestimating the combinatorial explosion that occurs when you try t

Then by all means build such a single-server Watson clone and program it! I think you're underestimating the combinatorial explosion that occurs when you try to do any kind of AI over natural language (and I speak from experience). Though I get your point that it seems they haven't reduced the big-O complexity of the problem; but what if it's irreducible? In fact I do think eventually a smaller scale implementation of a Watson clone will happen, and not just because of Moore's law. As Steve Wozniak said in a forward to a book about the Apple 1, "Some very simple ideas are very hard to do the first time." It seems to take a first execution to inspire the people who will come after and find simpler ways to do it. Somehow just knowing that it has been done is enough to set another inventor down the path of doing it even better. This happened frequently in the field of steam engines and thermodynamics in the 17 and 1800s, when just hearing about what one person had done would lead the next person to leap frog it.

spitfire 16y ago
Michael Abrash said something like Woz's quote also. Once you know it /can/ be done it somehow becomes easier. Often the less you know the better you are. Example, in his black book abrash tells a story about working at number nine. Their got word that one of their competitors had put a FIFO buffer on one of their cards (this was the ISA period 386 era). The staff at number nine panicked. They were so close to being finished their design they didn't have the space for a FIFO. So they put a single bit write FIFO in. Then they taped out and went to market, praying they could compete. Then the other card came out on the market.... with an 8byte read FIFO. At the time video memory was /dead/ slow, so everyone designed their programs to never, ever, ever read VGA memory. Instead you wrote to a virtual buffer and flipped it to the screen. The results, number nine absolutely creamed the competition for some time. And people still didn't read VGA memory. Moral: sometimes just knowing it can be done is all you need. and often too much knowledge will send you down the wrong path.
gojomo 16y ago
Then by all means build such a single-server Watson clone and program it! What's the prize? Can I get the same access IBM had, including a show appearance if my implementation is competitive enough? (I'm not saying the task is easy enough for an unpaid hobbyist to attempt; I am saying IBM's 10 racks of 9 maxed-configuration machines seems more designed for promotional optics than to match the task at hand.)

spitfire 16y ago

Michael Abrash said something like Woz's quote also. Once you know it /can/ be done it somehow becomes easier. Often the less you know the better you are. Example, in his black book abrash tells a story about working at number nine. Their got word that one of their competitors had put a FIFO buffer on one of their cards (this was the ISA period 386 era). The staff at number nine panicked. They were so close to being finished their design they didn't have the space for a FIFO. So they put a single bit write FIFO in. Then they taped out and went to market, praying they could compete. Then the other card came out on the market.... with an 8byte read FIFO. At the time video memory was /dead/ slow, so everyone designed their programs to never, ever, ever read VGA memory. Instead you wrote to a virtual buffer and flipped it to the screen. The results, number nine absolutely creamed the competition for some time. And people still didn't read VGA memory. Moral: sometimes just knowing it can be done is all you need. and often too much knowledge will send you down the wrong path.

gojomo 16y ago

Then by all means build such a single-server Watson clone and program it! What's the prize? Can I get the same access IBM had, including a show appearance if my implementation is competitive enough? (I'm not saying the task is easy enough for an unpaid hobbyist to attempt; I am saying IBM's 10 racks of 9 maxed-configuration machines seems more designed for promotional optics than to match the task at hand.)