14 DAY TRIAL // The game “Jeopardy!” is one of the most popular TV competitions, since it needs its contestants to have not only good knowledge in all subjects, but also quick minds and nerves of steel.
Some time ago, Watson became the first computer to win a game, and it won against the best champion ever recorded, not some random challenger.
After that, though, Watson seemed to fall into a limbo of disuse, since no one could decide exactly what its fledgling AI could be used for next, without it being a waste.
Now, the supercomputer has become the backbone of the Watson Discovery Advisor, a system that is able to look through pretty much every scientific paper in existence and provide answers to the queries of everyone with access to it.
Considering that there are over 50 million such papers, and all of them have dozens to hundreds of pages each, that's a lot of information to comb through indeed.
Still, it's doing it. In fact, several institutions, like the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, are making use of Watson's ability to decide for itself what info to look and how. Upon being asked, Watson identified proteins that modify protein p53 (used to prevent cancer) by checking about 70,000 papers. It took Watson weeks instead of years, according to its creators at IBM.