Watson: A Computer That Plays Jeopardy

IBM has designed a super computer that plays Jeopardy and it is quite good as can be seen in the video below.
At first, the computer was terrible. One question was "This famous Frenchman did..." and Watson's answer was "How tasty is my Frenchman?"
Today, the machine is much better. Below you can watch it take on two Jeopardy Champions, as well as read an excrept from a pcmag.com article.

A common mortal might be able to best a computer in the strategic game of Chess, but when it comes to the TV game show Jeopardy, humanity is batting 0-for-1.

New video from Engadget shows IBM's Watson question-answer supercomputer putting the hurt on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings (74 wins in a row, during his heyday) and Brad Rutter ($3.25 million won, the most cash ever awarded on Jeopardy). Although there's some reprieve for humanity's two representatives: The filmed round was designed to give them a little practice against Watson, and it's not as if the loss was a total blow-out. Watson ended up with $4,400 in Jeopardy cash (what will he/she/it purchase?), Jennings took second with $3,400, and Rutter placed third with $1,200.

We've reported on Watson's actual "thought" process, as it were—the complicated method behind the computer's analysis of a given Jeopardy question and formulation of the answer by running through its digital "brain" of more than 200 million pages' worth of information contained Internet during the actual competition, but the 80-teraflop machine still has to hit the same kind of signaling buzzer that any other Jeopardy contestant would activate to answer a question.

It also had to pass the official Jeopardy entrance exam too, just like any other player.

Game show pundits have noted, however, that Watson's strategy in Jeopardy as-a-whole could give the machine a natural advantage over its human competitors. As the saying goes, "The only winning move is not to play," and that's exactly what Watson does if it can't formulate a highly probable answer to a given Jeopardy question: It doesn't guess.

Watson has about three seconds between the question's beginning and the buzzing process to formulate an answer—doing so by parsing its thoughts with around 100 different algorithms to generate a confident reply. Watson's lead manger David Ferrucci , has previously said that this process could take a conventional desktop system around two hours to generate a reply.

As the video below shows, Watson doesn't lose a single dollar during its Jeopardy match—neither does Jennings or Rutter, for what it's worth. But while the system can spit out rote answers to general, fact-based questions without pause, Watson is hardly an infallible competitor. The system struggled most with Jeopardy's fill-in-the-blank questions, which require one to correctly consider the text before and after the requested answer.