Watson

• Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language,developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci.
• Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J. Watson.

• In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show Jeopardy!, in the show's only human-versus-machine match-up to date. In a two-game, combined-point match, broadcast in three Jeopardy! episodes February 14–16, Watson beat Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the lonAp streak (75 days).

• Watson received the first prize of $1 million, while Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter received $300,000 and $200,000,respectively. Jennings and Rutter pledged to donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM divided Watson's winnings between two charities.
• Watson's three most probable responses were displayed by the television screen. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage,including the full text of Wikipedia. Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game.

Software:

Watson's software was written in various languages, including at least Java, C++, and Prolog and uses Apache Hadoop framework for distributed computing, Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework, IBM’s DeepQA software and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system.“ more than 100 different techniques are used to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses.”

Data:

• The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies, and ontologies. Specifically, DBPedia, WordNet, and Yago were used.
• The IBM team provided Watson with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material that it could use to build its knowledge. Although Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game, it contained 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage.