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I was impressed by Watson's performance — until I considered that “he” consisted of 2,800 typical PCs wired together in about a 400 square foot room and, including his 12 tons of COOLING equipment, probably weighed around 10 tons and was competing with a human consisting of a 3# lump of specialized nerve cells called a brain which was fully portable and was self-cooling.

I think it will be a long time before IBM can scale Watson down to anything as miraculous and efficient as we are.

"...with a human consisting of a 3# lump of specialized nerve cells called a brain which was fully portable and was self-cooling.
I think it will be a long time before IBM can scale Watson down to anything as miraculous and efficient as we are."

Well said, besides the human brain is also focusing on a billion other functions while its competing against a single-minded machine:
Keeping that complex body humming along and all of its seperate systems in synch.
Thinking about his job, politics, relationships, etc., all passing through his consious mind - I mean none of us can make it stop - that stuff just humms along inside there....

“I think it will be a long time before IBM can scale Watson down to anything as miraculous and efficient as we are.”

I hate to admit that you might very possibly be wrong, in as much as “scaling down” is not the real issue.

Could you have competed against the two human contestants, and done as good or better than they did?

That’s the real question and I believe that there may not be a very large number of human’s who could have done as well or better than the two human contestants.

But now the computer industry knows “a machine” could match them. And, making copies of that machine is very easy and the only food those machines need is electricity, to “work” 24/7/365.

What IBM proved is that “a machine”, having no prior knowledge of the questions, could compete against two humans known to be superior at answering complex questions covering a very broad range of subjects.

It will be easier, I believe, for the computer industry to create many “Watsons” than it will for our society to create (and put to use) many people like the two Watson competed against.

I thought Watson’s failures were more interesting than its successes-how the heck did it get “Toronto” for an answer to the first day’s Final Jeopardy? You would think the category being “U.S. Cities” would eliminate that immediately as a potential answer.

I was impressed by Watson's performance — until I considered that “he” consisted of 2,800 typical PCs wired together in about a 400 square foot room and, including his 12 tons of COOLING equipment, probably weighed around 10 tons and was competing with a human consisting of a 3# lump of specialized nerve cells called a brain which was fully portable and was self-cooling.

The old IBM 360 MAINFRAME computers that I used to work with took up more like 4000 square feet, had at least 12 tons of cooling equipment, probably weighed more than 10 tons.

A cell phone has more computer 'power' than those old mainframes.

We had two mainframes. One had 500k of memory, the other had 750k (WOOHOO!).

A cell phone has more computing power today than those old mainframes.

It may be a while before a computer can do ALL the things the BRAIN/MIND (whatever that is) can do, but I bet it won't be long before they 'shrink' the hardware they used to play Jeopardy down to something more reasonable in size.