The Computer History Museum is hosting an evening with with our trivia overlord IBM Watson, and chief scientist David Ferrucci, Tuesday, Nov 15 at 6pm. Admission is free.
IBM Watson really is an amazing piece of software, much more interesting than Deep Blue. Chess, like all board games, is very artificial. While there’s no doubt a technical achievement in being able to search a large number of well defined states in parallel, but it is a bit abstracted from real problems. Watson on the other hand deals with natural language. You ask it random lookup questions, and it answers. It’s a technology – along with Siri – that is futuristic.