I feel special!

Thanks to PCMK's connection with Burn Lewis, I had a chance this morning to slip over to IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and meet "Watson." PBS was visiting to shoot an interview with the Jeopardy!-playing computer and the team who created him.

I watched as they conducted a practice session of the game show, with Burn at the console telling Watson when to speak. I watched the front-end screen that displays to the operator the varioius responses that Watson's considering and the relative degree of certainty he feels. (In the practice session, Watson outplayed someone from the team that created him and the representative from PBS!)

I also had a chance to visit the inner-workings of this, the "Smartest Machine on Earth." He'll be featured tomorrow night on NOVA: Premiering February 9, 2011 at 10pm on PBS.

And, of course, by now the world knows that next Monday, Feb. 14, Watson will be playing the big boys (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter) on Jeopardy!

--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor