ibm – The Knight Shift

So one of the bigger stories this past week has been IBM’s supercomputer Watson beating all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter during a three-game series on Jeopardy!. Watson’s final haul was $77,147, with Jennings coming in second with $24,000 and Rutter third with $21,600. During Final Jeopardy! on the last night of the contest Jennings wrote “Who is Stoker?” and in parenthesis added “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”.

I thought Watson’s performance was… impressive. But, I’m not too terrified about a droid uprising just yet.

For one thing, Watson is not much more than a glorified search engine. IBM’s engineers assured the Jeopardy! audience that Watson could not access the Internet: that “he” relied entirely on his oodles of terabytes of storage, containing (it is thought) every iota of trivia that has possibly been digitized. Clearly, an advantage was held by Watson.

And yet, even ...

It’s a pentacene molecule

Uncategorized

Pentacene, chemical formula C₂₂H₁₄ and the above image is such a big deal because it’s the first time ever that photographs of actual molecules have been obtained.

Mash here for the story on how IBM’s scientists conquered a decades-long technical challenge....

IBM using lawsuit to keep Apple from giving you the last iPod you’ll ever want?

Uncategorized

A few weeks ago Apple hired Mark Papermaster to be its new head of development over the iPod and iPhone lines. All well and good… except that Papermaster was also previously the vice-president of the microprocessor and chip technology at IBM, and there was a “no-compete” clause in his contract with his former employer. Papermaster has countered that he’s going to be involved in entertainment devices: something that IBM has never pursued and thus, the clause is invalid in his case. It’s now wound up in the courts, where IBM is suing to keep Papermaster from working at Apple.

Now we know why IBM is really interested in locking Papermaster out of the Jobs Mob…

IBM has been developing something called “racetrack” memory and it’s afraid that the technology it developed will wind up in the iPod and iPhone. And it’s easy to see why Apple could conceivably be interested ...