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Watch IBM's Watson On Jeopardy Tonight
JohnMurtari notes that the media hype machines are massively promoting tonight's battle between Jeopardy champions and a super computer. Yes it's a PR stunt. But I imagine the actual research probably had a lot of interesting problems to address. Anyway, you can learn about IBM Watson if you're interested. I'm sure the most amusing bits will be on YouTube about 30 seconds after air time.
I tried to explain to the wife how amazing it is. She isn't technology illiterate, in fact I'd say she's well above average, but she just didn't see what was so impressive about it. People don't understand that there is an enormous gap between being able to retrieve general information on a subject and being able to answer a specific question. In their minds computers have been doing 99% of this for a good decade now; closing the last 1%, even if it is arguable the hardest percent, just isn't that cool to anyone outside of CS.
Yes, they are hyping it for more than it's worth, but there's one thing here worth hyping: the fact that IBM still runs a state-of-the-art computer science research program. Just about every other corporation has gutted whatever research institute they had and concentrated their R&D funds on directly marketable products. IBM still runs the Watson research center that develops ideas from basic computer science down to products, even if it takes more than a decade to do it and the results are not certain. That is certainly worth respect.