The Pentagon’s procurement system is so broken they are calling on Watson

Every time I see an article which talks about &quot;Watson&quot; as an individual solution to a problem I find myself wondering what the people paying for it all think that &quot;Watson&quot; is?<p>Realistically its like 10+ racks filled with POWER systems loaded up with terabytes of RAM running SUSE Linux using Apache Hadoop for distributed computing, then some IBM Proprietary software solutions + a few other open bits and pieces (ie Apache UIMA) cobbled together to get something which behaves as though it understands natural language.<p>Honestly if you put most data-centric systems on a platform with dozens, if not hundreds, of POWER CPUs with 8-16 cores a piece and 4 threads&#x2F;core and then put the entire data store into RAM so you could get at it quickly, I suspect that you could fool most people into thinking there was intelligence behind it, not just raw computing power.

My understanding is procurement is and remains broken because there are entrenched powers who benefit greatly from that situation. It is working as designed by the people who wrote the rules, bringing great profit to the intended recipients. No change of the system will be allowed that threatens this property.

Here&#x27;s something fun to digest.<p>&gt; “While our acquisition system is very complex, it is document based. . .It’s unreasonable to expect that a single individual or even a group of individuals to be able to fully understand all of the relevant documents to answer a specific question.”<p>Total pages: 1,897 pages<p>Total pages in tax code: 16,845 pages<p>Total pages in Obamacare: 11,000 pages

Machines making decisions due to our own man made complexity, wonder when this will become the norm for all facets of government, until the machines create their own massive complexity making it even more difficult for humans thus we end up completely relying on them.

Looks like the saying that nobody gets fired for buying IBM is still valid.

On a slightly tangentially related note, I was astonished to hear a couple of years back that the UK has legislation written in the proprietary dialect of some patented Oracle software:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oracle.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;industries&#x2F;public-sector&#x2F;058991.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oracle.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;industries&#x2F;public-sector&#x2F;058991.htm...</a>

Why are they throwing even more complex solutions at the complicated procurement procedure?<p>Couldn&#x27;t the solution be to simplify the procedure itself?

Something tells me this can&#x27;t possibly end well.