A cure for the Big Blues

摘要

"It's a silly project to work on, it's too gimmicky, it's not a real computer-science test, and we probably can't do it anyway." These were reportedly the first reactions of the team of ibm researchers challenged to build a computer system capable of winning "Jeopardy!", a television quiz show. Yet within five years they had created Watson (named after Thomas Watson, who built up the company), which used natural-language programming to understand questions the way a human would, and massive processing power to find the likeliest answer from vast amounts of data.