NEI Nuclear Notes

IBM makes specialized computers to demonstrate advances in computer science – and doubtless to make a few sales, too. When it created its chess playing behemoth, Deep Blue (blue is IBM’s corporate color), it kept it functional long enough to beat grand master Gary Kasparov, but didn’t do any rematches after that. IBM had proved its point – why muddy the achievement? So I figured when its game playing computer Watson won a Jeopardy tournament against Kasparov equivalents in the Jeopardy sphere, that was it. Time to move on. But IBM has kept Watson going – and the computer promptly got smoked by a puny human – well, not so puny, really, definitely human . Defending humans against future Terminators, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) defeated IBM's Watson in a special congressional edition of "Jeopardy!" The victory by Holt, a nuclear physicist, came Monday night after the super-computer had trounced other champions of the information game show, including Ken Jennings and ...