Did you know that IBM Watson once learned to swear, and the company had to dig through the vocabulary, and delete the entire urban dictionary just so it can prevent from swearing all the time? Apparently, someone thought it would be fun to add urban dictionary to Watson, but the computer became sassy at employees.
Jokes aside, Watson is a question answering computer system, regarded by many experts in the industry as the smartest computer ever built. What makes Watson so smart? Well, for starters, the computer has access to 200 million pages of content. All those pages eat up almost 4 terabytes of disk storage. Casual users use up to 1 terabyte, mostly with pictures, videos and games.
The computer was named after the first CEO of IBM, Thomas J. Watson. Specifically developed to answer questions, Watson competed in the quiz Jeopardy in 2011 against former winners, and won the first place.
Watson struggles when there are short clues. In 2013, the company announced that Watson software system will be used for medical uses, mainly for utilization management decisions in lung cancer. We can only assume how far will Watson go in commercial usage.
