General News: Math Team Is Wowed by Watson
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| CCHS seniors Charlie Boucher and Kaitlin Strine on the Jeopardy set with Watson. |
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| The CCHS math team and Watson. |
March 17, 2011
By Ross Miller
On Monday, March 14, members of the CCHS Math Team toured IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights where thet had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet “Watson”, the famous computer that soundly defeated human contestants on a recent Jeopardy quiz show.
Led by math teachers Kathy Zammit and Stephen Cerbino, and accompanied by CCHS principal Dr. Frank Sheboy, the students got a rare peek behind the scenes of this million-dollar winning computer. The field trip was made possible by Herbert Ho, father of senior Alex Ho and an engineer at IBM’s Fishkill facility.
Mr. Ho joined Scott Brooks, IBM’s vice president of marketing and communications, to introduce students to this modern marvel. Named after IBM’s first president, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., Watson the machine was described as an algorithm-based computer with 10 refrigerators’ worth of hardware. Incredibly, it processes trillions of lines of Java code per second. While Watson wasn’t accepting questions on the day they visited, the opportunity to see and understand the back-end systems impressed the students who also posed for a photograph with Watson in the actual studio where Jeopardy was played.
The teachers remarked that several students thanked them for their “best field trip ever.” “This trip likely inspired more than a few students to consider doing important work,” Mrs. Zammit said. “Students fulfilled IBM’s simple motto on their own, without being told to: Think.”
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