(Photo: The Morton Report)

In order to pass the Turing Test, a computer must display both emotional and intellectual behavior that's almost indistinguishable from that of humans. IBM's most famous supercomputer, Watson, is close, but first he must emulate one of humanity's finer inventions: crazy Internet slang. YOLO!

According to Fortune, researchers at IBM attempted to indoctrinate Watson into the wonderful world of LOL and OMG, but in the process they accidentally caused the supercomputer to develop a bit of a filthy mouth. As it turned out, Watson "couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity," and curse words lifted from Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia began sneaking into his lexicon. He even began responding to some researcher queries with the retort "Bullshit!" (Though, to be fair, it has to be so annoying to work with mere human mortals when you're a supercomputer.)

In the end, the IBM researchers had to create a filter that would stop Watson from cursing, as well as wipe his memory of all Urban Dictionary information.

If only we could do the same.

(Photo: Bombed in Outerspace)

Okay, folks: this is not a drill. The Singularity is set to hit the silver screen, with Batman director Christopher Nolan signed on to executive produce.

The Wrap reports that in the film, titled Transcendence and based on a story by Jack Paglen, Johnny Depp "will play a scientist whose brain is uploaded into a supercomputer" while trying to create the first ever sentient computer. Nanotechnology and the Singularity are also said to play pivotal roles in the film, which explains the nerd boner you are currently sporting.

Johnny Depp may seem like a strange casting choice, but given his penchant for bizarre roles, we imagine he'll play a mad scientist quite convincingly. He'll be playing the main character, Will, who is assassinated by terrorists who are against technology. When his wife uploads his brain, Will begins to respond to her queries through the computer. By hooking his brain-cum-computer up to the Internet, he can continue his scientific research.

The Wrap warns that the script summary it received could be out of date, but honestly as long as the film includes brain supercomputers and Christopher Nolan, we'll be just fine. Now if we can get Ray Kurzweil as an advisor to this thing, it's sure to be an instant masterpiece.

Via Forbes' Eric Savitz:

The company this morning announced a $188 million multi-phase, multi-year contract from the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications to provide the supercomputer for the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters project. The deal will be for a Cray XE6 system and a future upgrade to the new XK6 system.

And directly from CRAY's release:

Consisting of products and services, the multi-phase, multi-year contract is valued at $188 million. The Cray supercomputer will be installed in multiple phases over the first three quarters of 2012 at the University of Illinois' National Petascale Computing Facility. The integrated XE6 and XK6 supercomputer will feature new 16-core AMD (NYSE: AMD - News) Opteron™ 6200 Series processors (formerly code-named "Interlagos"), a next-generation GPU from NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA - News), called "Kepler," and a new integrated storage solution from Cray. Acceptance of the complete system is anticipated to occur in the fourth quarter of 2012.

And people, of course, are going...nuts.

Between this and the whole Buffett/IBM thing, apparently people are going nuts for supercomputers now. The world has already made this the year of the super rap album. Is this the moment of the supercomputer? And if that happens to be the case....you know what that is, right?