Watson, the Computer Jeopardy! Champion, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence

March 2, 2011

What makes Watson work? Is it thinking? And what does that mean? Author Stephen Baker provides the answers. Earlier this month, the nation watched as Watson, a computer system designed by IBM, drubbed the two all time champions of Jeopardy. It was a much more difficult challenge than, say, beating a grandmaster at chess. To win, Watson had to navigate the vagaries of human speech, the idioms, the puns, the cultural references — all the things, in short, that make language delightful and deeply machine unfriendly.