Do you have a reference for that 65 kW of power?

Thanks.

Of course Google would congratulate IBM. I congratulate IBM, too. It’s an impressive achievement, both as technology and marketing! That doesn’t turn off my ability to analyze the scope of the problem, and the institutional incentives involved.

Did the IBM team even have an incentive to optimize for hardware/cost? Or was showing off a room full of expensive computers one of the goals from the beginning?

The excerpt from the Baker book at Gizmodo actually feeds my confidence. It reports that at the outset of the project in 2007, a single IBM neophyte (!) with only 1 month, 1 computer, and a measly 500 training clues (!) was “nearly matching” Piquant, IBM’s “state-of-the-art in Q-A technology”! Somehow Baker accepts the project leader’s spin that this was an “ideal” result for the project.

Huh?!?

How many man-years went into Piquant, and a lone fresh graduate matched it in the Jeopardy domain in a month? Rather than viewing this as a vindication of their plan to devote a giant team and hardware plant to the problem, why didn’t they let the “Basement Baseline” team have a couple more people, a handful more machines, and a few more months of time to work (if not 3.5 more years!), and the 200,000+ clue J!Archive of past Jeopardy rounds?

Why didn’t Jeopardy and IBM let other teams compete for real money, like the DARPA Grand Challenge or Netflix Prize?

The end result is impressive, but also heavily orchestrated to sell Big Iron, and unvalidated by actual resource-constrained, independent, external competitive evaluation.

Chess? Check. Jeopardy? Check. Next up – Go? (We wouldn't be surprised.) Congrats, @IBMResearch, on your big win w/ #IBMWatson—
A Googler (@google) February 17, 2011

Could it be the brainiacs at Google, who know something about searches, appreciate how difficult the Jeopardy! challenge was?

I also suggest you read this:
http://ca.gizmodo.com/5759014/could-watson-have-been-defeated-by-homebrew

IBM checked out the possibility that this could’ve been done by a “basement hacker”. They found a “homebrew” approach fell well short of the goal.

Why did nature give us 100 billion neurons when mice have far less? After all, mice can do a lot of the things humans do? There’s no difference between the mouse and human brain except in scale. What a waste of resources for nature!

Storage
Watson 15 Terabytes,
Brain 1000 Terabytes

Processing power
Watson 80 Teraflops
Brain 100 Teraflops

So Watson is at a considerable disadvantage.

Let’s just stop for one second and marvel at the human brain and the 2 billion years of evolution which gave birth to it.