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This week, IBM’s supercomputer Watson had quite a successful appearance in the man-versus-machine Jeopardy! showdown. Even with a couple flubs, Watson was able to handily beat two of the trivia game show’s most prolific winners. Unfortunately, Watson’s winnings won’t make up for cancellation of IBM’s hefty contract with the California Department of Education if the company doesn’t meet deadlines to fix the state’s data system. Maybe that’s not so important to IBM, but it’s not a trivial matter for California students.
We’ll admit to being excited — even thrilled — by Watson’s sheer computing

Watson’s impressive debut on Jeopardy this past week got me wondering if there has ever been a serious attempt to program an artificial intelligence to write good poetry. I don’t mean just throwing together a proper meter and rhyme scheme — that seems easy enough. I’m talking about an attempt to create a machine that “understands” how to manipulate language to convey freshness, wisdom and emotional depth.
So I searched the web for Watson’s poetic doppelganger, imagining a blinking, spinny sphere that, out of principle, hasn’t sold out to the national TV spotlight, and that perhaps wears a beret. The internet is, in fact, rife with crude programs called poetry generators that randomly feed a user-supplied library of descriptive words into set poetic

Five years ago Time Magazine, echoing the novelist Douglas Coupland, asked, “Is Google God?” This week, the mantle has passed to IBM’s spectacular quiz-show computer, Watson.
If you haven’t seen Watson’s performance on Jeopardy, you really should. Better yet, see theNOVA program that presaged it. Like John the Baptist, the PBS program heralded Watson as, quite possibly, the bringer of a new age. (And, like John, PBS now faces beheading by ax-wielding House Republicans.)
Watson has developed a remarkable ability to decipher the layered meanings, allusions, and puns embedded in Jeopardy

Do you think that 50,000 years ago, as Cro-Magnons first began to filter into Europe, the resident Neanderthals scratched their bulky brows and wondered “gee, could these guys replace us?”
I strongly suspect that today, Homo sapiens is about to be replaced. But these next-gen sentients won’t wander in from Africa, as the gracile Cro-Magnons did: They’ll roll through the doors of artificial intelligence labs.
We’re inventing our successors. And as a modest sideshow in this dramatic development, an IBM computer with the come-hither moniker “Watson” will be crossing swords with two accomplished humans this week on the popular television quiz program, Jeopardy.
Depending on your personal philosophies — or maybe your susceptibility to the last blog post to cross your screen — you’re either betting on the vast, perfectly reliable memory banks and microsecond reaction times of Watson, or on the supple synapses of its human opponents, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Most people, I assume, will bet on their own species.
But the big picture is this: It doesn’t matter who wins the Jeopardy

“Help me Obi-wan Kenobi! You’re my only hope.” Watson’s voice echoed through the improvised Jeopardy studio at IBM Research, just north of New York City. It was a mid-summer practice round for IBM’s Jeopardy computer. But the game was halted while technicians made adjustments to Watson’s sound system. Like a recording on a loop, the machine kept pronouncing the same sentence: “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi…”
For me, this technical glitch came at a bad

Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Jeopardy’s two greatest champions, have brains packed with facts. In one Final Jeopardy, Rutter actually recalled that President James Garfield’s wife was named Lucretia. And he deduced from this that the Mediterranean island that shared a nickname with a 19th century First Lady was “Crete.”
You might think that IBM’s Jeopardy computer, which is taking on Rutter and Jennings next month, would “know” billions of facts. But in truth, Watson is sure of

Last week I wrote about how Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy computer, is “smarter” than Google. But there are plenty of things that throw the computer for a loss. In researching my book, Final Jeopardy, which amounts to a “biography” of Watson, I got a feel for how it “thinks.” Some examples:
Category: Diplomatic Relations
Clue: Of the four countries in the world that the U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with, the one that’s farthest north.
Correct Response: What is North Korea?
Once Watson understands this clue, which is not easy, one of its many algorithms launches two separate