After crushing the humanoids on Jeopardy this week, IBM’s Watson
computer took home $1 million in prize money. Instead of
throwing it away on Tiffany diamond-encrusted circuit boards or
a Lamborghini to show up other supercomputers, Watson is showing
that its silicon heart is in the right place. Half the money
will go to the World Vision, a nonprofit that helps children in
poverty, the other half to World Community Grid, IBM’s
humanitarian supercomputer. As we chronicled last year, World
Community Grid, or WCG, is an enormous volunteer computer
network dedicated to scientific research. Ordinary citizens
donate their idle laptops and desktops to be used for crunching
algorithms and conducting mathematical experiments that
accelerate research on clean energy and high-yield rice crops as
well as cures for cancer, AIDS, muscular dystrophy, and other
diseases. IBM started the free,open-source lab in 2004 to make a
virtual supercomputer available to researchers who couldn’t
otherwise afford one. Half of Watson’s wi