Comments on: Build your own Watson Jr.

Build your own Watson Jr.

Jasper Friendly Bear — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:04:58 -0800

It's not simple, and there's a lot of hand waiving involved, but an IBM researcher has published a guide to building your own "Watson Jr." using only commodity hardware and open source software. [Previously 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5] [via]

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:09:35 -0800

First, obtain Ken Jennings' brain.

By: sophist

sophist — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:09:38 -0800

Elementary, my dear.

By: oneswellfoop

oneswellfoop — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:14:35 -0800

NOT THAT WATSON.

By: oneswellfoop

oneswellfoop — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:16:00 -0800

Watson Jr. may not be powerful enough to win on "Jeopardy", but he'll probably clean up on "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?"

By: ooga_booga

ooga_booga — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:19:10 -0800

I would much prefer a Banana Jr. 2000.

By: graphnerd

graphnerd — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:25:22 -0800

Any other MeFites feel like Watson was designed especially for us? _{I feel like I should be upset for being pandered to, but damn, Watson is awesome. And I'm glad IBM did it. Pander to me properly, and I'll take it.}

By: formless

formless — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:10:58 -0800

"IBM researcher", eh? We know the truth. It's you Watson! Admit it! He's begun phase two, spread his virtual genetic code around the world. It's safe to assume all communications originating from IBM HQ are corrupted at this point. Seriously though, I didn't know the underlying NLP and knowledge reasoning code was open source. Very cool.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:27:00 -0800

"My hands? They will play no further part in the matter."

By: 3mendo

3mendo — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:34:23 -0800

whoa, did they really use Cyc/Opencyc for watson? I never thought i would see a "real" world use for it.. amazed.

By: spiderskull

spiderskull — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:28:13 -0800

"Elementary, my dear." Fun fact: that quote does not actually appear in any of the Sherlock Holmes books.

By: iotic

iotic — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:41:00 -0800

Play it again, Sam. Plus, I do hope they're not waiving their hands. That's all the intelligent commentary I can manage on this thread.

By: felix

felix — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:12:15 -0800

IBM! Catch the magic! Next I suspect we'll see some hip virals!

By: fredludd

fredludd — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:29:18 -0800

1. Build a Watson Jr. 2. Acquire a few hundred sockpuppet identities 3. ??? ...

By: crunchland

crunchland — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 05:18:10 -0800

Where am I going to find a Speak-n-Spell in this day and age?!?

By: Babblesort

Babblesort — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 05:18:31 -0800

First, be smart from the very beginning.

By: DU

DU — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 05:19:37 -0800

Nthing the comments that I'm glad they used FLOSS and are promoting it. And 2nding the OpenCYC amazement. I remember being blown away by an article on CYC back in the early 90s and then just laughing at it like 10 years ago. But it seems to have done something after all. Why are all the links [inside brackets]?

By: pashdown

pashdown — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 05:49:15 -0800

"For the Human-Computer Interface [HCI], the IBM Watson received categories and clues as text files via TCP/IP" Color me disappointed. The most astonishing thing about watching the IBM Challenge was what I presumed was Watson's speech recognition.

By: ook

ook — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:05:40 -0800

Here's his recipe for delicious apple pie: Step 1: acquire a plot of land Step 2: build a kitchen Step 3: delicious apple pie! Seriously, it's not like I expected him to give away the whole store here, but all he talks about is infrastructure; all the interesting stuff is handwaved away as "a small matter of programming".

By: smackfu

smackfu — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:13:45 -0800

The most astonishing thing about watching the IBM Challenge was what I presumed was Watson's speech recognition. Eh, the far easier way to do it is to OCR the clues off the board, especially since the human contestants just read them too. That's a solved problem... an iPhone can do it in real time.

By: DU

DU — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:33:08 -0800

Even the speech recognition wouldn't be too hard, given it's a single human enunciating clearly into a microphone and with plenty of training material available.

By: haveanicesummer

haveanicesummer — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 07:22:33 -0800

The most astonishing thing is that Watson got zero questions correct on the "Also On Your Computer Keys" category. Has he developed irony and a sense of humor already? Does he make Mannie read him jokes and explain them???

By: kmz

kmz — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 07:47:29 -0800

Bah. Get back to me when Watson can beat humans on this Jeopardy board.

By: storybored

storybored — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:02:19 -0800

"Basically, UIMA lets you scan unstructured documents, gleam the important points, and put that into a database for later retrieval." Basically, the piano lets you play Beethoven, improvise free jazz, and make a million dollars playing Carnegie Hall.

By: RobotVoodooPower

RobotVoodooPower — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:39:48 -0800

I don't think Watson uses Cyc -- it's just something open-source that was included so the author could finish his article on how to install lots of crap on to IBM servers.

By: Mike D

Mike D — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:40:45 -0800

Frankly, I doubt you could build much of anything if you waived the use of your hands, but maybe others know better than I.

By: badgermushroomSNAKE

badgermushroomSNAKE — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:41:08 -0800

This dude isn't one of our Watson-team guys, but I like his style. Mostly because he ruled what I worked on necessary for Watson Jr. Yay for seeing my job in a green box instead of red!

By: Mike D

Mike D — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:42:08 -0800

Damn... pompomtom got there first. I hereby waive my comment.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:22:22 -0800

This article is bizarre. He's going on and on about how to use basic Unix stuff, like wget or NFS. Dear Mr. IBM Smart Guy: there are better sources for teaching Linux. How about talking about information retrieval, you know, the unique thing you did? He finally sort of gets there, apparently the magic is UIMA. Maybe there's some articles about that somewhere.

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:39:29 -0800

Where am I going to find a Speak-n-Spell in this day and age?!? I'd just hire Dr. Sbaitso; he works for cheap.