Watson, IBM's latest DeepQA supercomputer, defeated its two human challengers during a demonstration round of Jeopardy on Jan. 13. The supercomputer will face former Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a two-game, men-versus-machine tournament to be aired in February.

However, the Jeopardy match-up was not the "culmination" of four years of work by IBM Research scientists that worked on the Watson project, but rather, "just the beginning of a journey," Katharine Frase, vice president of industry solutions and emerging business at IBM Research, told eWEEK.

Supercomputers that can understand natural human language -- complete with puns, plays on words and slang -- to answer complex questions will have applications in areas such as health care, tech support and business analytics, David Ferrucci, the lead researcher and principal investigator on the Watson project, said at the media event showcasing Watson at IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Lab.

Watson analyzes "real language," or spoken language, as opposed to simple or keyword-based questions, to understand the question, and then looks at the millions of pieces of information it has stored to find a specific answer, said Ferrucci. "The hard part for Watson is finding and justifying the correct answer, computing confidence that it's right and doing it fast enough," said Ferrucci.

This is where Jeopardy comes in. The quiz show covers a broad range of topics, and the questions can be asked in a variety of ways, whether it's quirky, straightforward or downright strange. Creating a machine that can take on human challengers on Jeopardy became a "rally cry" for researchers to think about question and answer processing in a "more open and different way," Frase said.

For more, read the eWeek article: IBM's Watson Supercomputer Beats Humans in Jeopardy Practice Match.

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