Process This

Mainstream media has temporarily got caught up in the discussion about meaning-based computing and processing with IBM's Watson kicking some champion butt on Jeopardy! My first thought when I heard about this a few month's back was - why is this IBM? OK, the Deep Blue chess master and all that, but this is the leading edge of software. Why is this not Microsoft, Autonomy or another software company leading the way in showing how NLP has broader application?

Then I went to the IBM website and I realized the answer. Watson is a marketing gimmick to demonstrate the power of IBM's Power7 processor. IBM's marketing team are using natural language processing as a theme to show how powerful it's hardware is, because natural language processing requires a heck of a lot of, well, processing. So, in some ways this both undermines and supports the sense that NLP has real world application by firstly showing it in a mainstream application (answering questions on Jeopardy!) but secondly where "a single, precise answer to a question requires custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and thousands of POWER7 computing cores working in a massively parallel system".

OK, so bringing in Moore's Law, that's how long til I can give my laptop a name and it can make me some money on Millionaire?