las vegas marvin is just a few inches tall but he has a big mouth what do you think of that human he sneers as he ties the scores 11 is that the best you can do he jeers as he takes a 21 lead moments later his tone switches to pleading oh no ibm will fire me if i lose he says as the score is tied 22 the decisive move comes up and marvin is beaten my robot mind is officially blown he intones making a fizzing sound as the audience laughs and clapsthe game the cute little robot was playing rock paper scissors has been played by children for generations but when this seemingly simple game is played hundreds of times it throws up a wealth of data that can be crunched to come up with complex strategies marvin has played it over 600 times with human rivals already and every time he plays he learns you wont beat me again he tells one of the humans who is walking away triumphantly its meant as a joke but one suspects that there may be an element of truth to itmarvin is one of several devices including pepper a robotic concierge olli an interactive selfdriving minibus made of 3d printed parts and rita an intuitive whiteboard that provides transcripts of meetings taking place in the room and also offers translations on request that were on display at ibm world of watson wow the threeday conference attended by over 17000 people was essentially a showcase for watson ibms ambitious multibillion dollar bet on artificial intelligence the new frontier that every major tech giant from amazon to google to microsoft is racing to exploreibm though insists that watson is more than just ai and prefers to use the term cognitive when referring to watsons capabilities unlike conventional computers which have to be programmed watson understands the world in the way that humans do through senses learning and experience but at a speed no human can match it can read more than 800 million pages per secondunsurprisingly india plays a key part in ibms plans both as potential market and talent pool the biggest developer conference that happened for the company this year was in bengaluru were planning another one there soon there is just amazing talent that we see so i am very excited about it india said ibm watson gm david kenny we see a lot of innovation coming out of india there isnt much legacy that needs to be adopted so people are immediately deciding cognitive systems he addedwatson first shot to fame in 2011 when it beat two human champions in the quiz show jeopardy more recently it assisted grammywinning music producer alex da kid in creating a song called its not easy which was released last month during a discussion with ibm ceo ginni rometty at the conference da kid revealed that the song had already gone to no1 on spotify