'Jeopardy!' to pit humans against IBM machine

[AprilSeven]

YAY!! Big Blue's AI to go up against a couple humans who have done well on this game show. This ought to be fun to watch (too bad it wasn't happening in Japan -- they'd probably call the computer Atom instead of "Watson" (named after IBM'S founder)

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20101214/D9K3LU500.html

[jeffbert]

I thought I heard something about that. It seems to me, that it should be a bit more difficult to make a program that simulates a Jeopardy contestant than one that plays chess. Making it associate the correct answer with all the figures of speech, and such will be very challenging.

[fafner]

No doubt about it: understanding natural speech is the main AI problem.