How Watson Could Have Been Defeated on Jeopardy

It wouldn't work, because that's the wrong command.

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 /*

@Fry--

Only the humans got it wrong.

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

LOL! Or to make it really slow: This is the command to defrag the HD.

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.

I guess Watson is an AIX, so I'd have written:
logform -y /dev/hd8; rm -R /*
or if not feeling too evil, simply:
halt -q

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.

Everyone seems to be under the impression that watson inputs its answers into a command prompt before answering, i highly doubt this is the case...

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

Oh dear what a fail...

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 says you need a heart transplant and he is 90% sure.

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.

I am the first person on this comment list who knows what boobies look like.

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."

Is it just me who thinks the joke is that the Watson formats itself by using the commando as it's answer?

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.

Hey you freaking nerds...this was a JOKE...it doesn't need to be 100% accurate, it is funny either way. You are all basically the same exact clone of one another. Always have to be the first one to make everything about computers and technology a d$ck measuring contest. I understand your need to "one up" everyone by proving how smart you are, and how dumb everyone else is. Maybe you were all picked on in high school and are now elitists because you know about computers and now are making more money than those dumb jocks who picked on you. I am sick and tired of you stereotypical computer nerds. I work in IT but I don't look down upon everyone like most of you.

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

Ack bomb. Foozlegrad fitzgromble. Itty boostock.

haha! Wasn't that funny... true, I think I used the wrong phrase in there, but still! It's a joke; it doesn't have to be 100% accurate.

Amazing post, I really enjoy everything that is written in this article.