10 Questions for IBM's Watson
David Johnson for TIME
The System
Watson consists of 90 servers and 2880 processor cores powered by the POWER7 processor. Although the computer is not connected to the Internet, IBM's development team provided Watson with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material that it could use to build its knowledge. Watson plays the game by crunching through multiple algorithms at lightning speed and attaches a percentage score to what it believes is the correct response.