Smarter than you think

Clive Thompson in The New York Times about "Watson," a computer that IBM scientists expect will be "the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. (I'm surprised the article makes no reference to the 1957 film Desk Set, where librarian Katherine Hepburn pits her wits against Emerac, Hollywood's 50s version of Watson...and wins) Video.