On Feb 15, 2011, at 4:04 PM, Tom Huegel wrote: > I was just watching Jeopardy with Watson, IBM's 'thinking' computer. Quite > amazing even though his occasional misses are comical. There may be a PTF > available to fix that. I wonder what the business justification was for > building it.
Nova did an episode on the development of Watson and named the IBM executive who allegedly asked if IBM could program a computer to play Jeopardy after seeing the interest in Ken Jennings's win streak. I recognized his name: Charles Lickel, one of the past owners of VM. The Nova special discussed medical record keeping and other medical applications as an area where the improvements in natural language understanding might have a large pay-off. Nick
