How Watson Could Have Been Defeated on Jeopardy



IBM's Watson computer beat two human opponents on Jeopardy. Would this strategy have worked?

via Borepatch

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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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