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In February 2011, IBM’s Watson computer entered the championship round of the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy!, going on to beat Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, each long-time champions of the game. Fourteen years earlier, in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer had beaten world chess champion Garry Kasparov. At that time no one ascribed any aspects of human ‘intelligence’ to Deep Blue, even though playing chess well is often considered an indicator of human intelligence. Deep Blue’s feat, while remarkable, relied on using vast amounts of computing power to look ahead and search through many millions of possible move sequences. ‘Brute force, not “intelligence”,’ we all said. Watson’s success certainly appeared similar. Looking at Watson one saw dozens of servers and many terabytes of memory, packed into ‘the equivalent of eight refrigerators’, to quote Dave Ferrucci, the architect of Watson. Why should Watson be a surprise? Consider one of the easier questions that Watson answered during Jeopardy!: ‘Which New Yorker who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg was once considered the inventor of baseball?’ A quick Google search might reveal that Alexander Cartwright wrote the rules of the game; further, he also lived in Manhattan. But what about having fought at Gettysburg? Adding ‘civil war’ or even ‘Gettysburg’ to the query brings us to a Wikipedia page for Abner Doubleday where we find that he ‘is often mistakenly credited with having invented baseball’. ‘Abner Doubleday ’ is indeed the right answer, which Watson guessed correctly. However, if Watson was following these sequence of steps, just as you or I might, how advanced would its abilities to understand natural language have to be? Notice that it would have had to parse the sentence ‘is often mistakenly credited with . . .’ and ‘understand’ it to a sufficient degree and recognize it as providing sufficient evidence to conclude that Abner Doubleday was ‘once considered the inventor of baseball’. Of course, the questions can be tougher: ‘B.I.D. means you take and Rx this many times a day’—what’s your guess? How is Watson supposed to ‘know’ that ‘B.I.D.’ stands for the Latin bis in die, meaning twice a day, and not for ‘B.I.D. Canada Ltd.’, a manufacturer and installer of bulk handling equipment, or even Bid Rx, an internet website? How does it decide that Rx is also a medical abbreviation? If it had to figure all this out from Wikipedia and other public resources it would certainly need farmore sophisticated techniques for processing language than we have seen in Chapter 2.

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