IBM's Question-Answering System "Watson" Revisited
religious freak writes "IBM has created and made the question answering algorithm, Watson, available online. Watson has competed in and won a majority of (mock) matches against humans in Jeopardy. Watson does not connect to the Internet to answer his questions, but rather seeks answers using many different algorithms then employs a ranking algorithm to choose the best answer." We mentioned Watson last year as well.
If the sample questions I just tried are anything to go by, and they've been running this thing against a variety of international volunteers online (I've no idea if this is the case), then damn right it's going to win - practically every question needed some knowledge of modern US brands/media/folklore. That ignores the fact that you need to know a bit about the premise of jeopardy to play, but I can forgive that. I just kept seeing the correct answer and thinking 'oh right. who?'