Earlier this month, the nation watched as Watson, a computer system designed by IBM, drubbed the two all time champions of Jeopardy. It was a much more difficult challenge than, say, beating a grandmaster at chess. To win, Watson had to navigate the vagaries of human speech, the idioms, the puns, the cultural references -- all the things, in short, that make language delightful and deeply machine unfriendly. Journalist Stephen Baker spent a year behind the scenes, as the team of IBM engineers struggled to design and build Watson in time for the show. He tells the story of project Watson, and what it means for the future, in his new book, " Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything ." He and Gareth Cook, the editor of Mind Matters, discussed Watson and artificial intelligence. [More]
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