[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Hahaha... As if they'd waste a breakthrough of that magnitude on a game show and not finding Osama.


Sorry. Watson is all about great internal architecture (plumbing) that lets it work in speeds approaching real-time on truly staggering data sets. The algorithms its running to compete at Jeopardy are so specialized and tweaked for the game it plays that Watson is useless outside that arena.

Otherwise, we could just keep feeding it data and asking questions like you proposed. Not gonna happen.

Just because something is specialized doesn't mean it isn't a huge stepping stone to greater achievements.

The first space capsules were pretty specalized, but they were a massive leap towards putting a man on the moon.

Watson was built to play Jeopardy, but what the people who built him learned about how to build a computer to interact and work in that way is the first step to computers that can do much more.