Elementary, Doctor Watson!

After Deep Blue, unbeatable at chess, IBM designed Watson. Developed over more than four years, this supercomputer is capable of quickly understanding and analysing questions put to it in natural language. It demonstrated its impressive abilities last February, when it won the TV quiz show "Jeopardy!".




The next step for Watson: to make medical diagnoses! Being able to turn this supercomputer into an able assistant still remains a distant dream for doctors. For the moment, researchers at IBM are making it memorise tons to data from scientific texts, but also from specialist blogs.

Watson is made up of 90 "Power 750" servers. Its power is equivalent to 360 "Power7" processors running at 3.5 GHz. Will patients trust an automated doctor? It's time to ask the question...

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