How Watson Could Have Been Defeated on Jeopardy

I’m sure that Watson has more than one drive. A better answer would have been “This command recursively forces all files to be removed.” rm -rf /*

Sorry It wouldn’t work, just like quoting “rm -rf /*” in this comment box doesn’t do anything to my linux my machine.

That’s the command to check and fix the filesystem. It’s the chkdsk of Linux. On watson it would probably not even take much time to complete. It will however complain that you’re using /dev/sdb1 at the moment and this is not a good idea. (Given that there is a /dev/sdb1 partition to start with…)

The command you’re looking for is mkfs.

Not being very Linux-saavy myself, I probably would have made the final clue something like, “This is the most recent piece of music (or book, or film) to move me to tears,” and accept any reasonable answer from Ken Jennings and Brad Rutler. If I wanted to be unfair, that is.

You can’t say ‘I will divide my dollar bill by zero and get infinite money.’

AIX is a UNIX & fsck will do a (F)ile (S)ystem (C)hec(K), and if Watson’s filesystem is large it will take a while

Watson uses SuSE linux.

Watson uses NFS for data storage and sharing, so you’d only need to toast the array on the NFS host. But, (assuming for fun that you could drop down to a root prompt) the linguistics programs probably don’t run on the NFS host, so dd would be less effective. In that case, a recursive rm may be the right choice, but you have to find the mount point.

New thought: (further assuming for fun that you could drop down to a root prompt) just ‘umount -a’ to unmount all non-root filesystems, which includes the NFS mounts, and then it would have no data, and the algorithms would throw all kinds of ‘file not found’ errors.

By the way: they’d just reboot Watson. It crashed a bunch of times in filming, making each episode take nearly four hours each to film.

reminds me of the *Omni* cartoon showing 2 guys in labcoats staring at another labcoat and a piece of chalk on the floor, with a chalkboard full of one big equation. The caption has one tech explaining to the other, “He just proved he doesn’t exist.”

AIX is not Linux. Watson was running Linux from what I read.

“rm -Rf /*” as root (no quotes), for nUbuntu users: The gods of African distro. naming thought you weren’t smart enough to use the root login, so root is not available to you without some trickery. Research sudo, or install Slackware, and really learn Linux.

Lighten up guys. Maybe it’s not the exact command you would have used, but you get the point. It’s FUNNY.

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