IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. The system was developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team. Watson was named after IBM’s founder and first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.
In 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! against champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, winning the first-place prize of 1 million USD. The system was based on combining techniques from different fields such as natural language processing, knowledge representation, information retrieval, and automatic inference. The knowledge of the Watson system was based on the preprocessing of hundreds of millions of pages on the Internet. During the competition, the system was not connected to the internet, and it still managed to answer most of the questions successfully.
After competing against the two greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time, IBM said that the technology behind Watson will be applied to some of the world’s most enticing challenges. In the video (10 min.) you can watch a breakdown of the match from Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and the IBM team members as they look toward the future. More than a decade after Watson’s memorable appearance, a New York Times article reviews the history of IBM’s artificial intelligence was supposed to transform industries and generate riches for the company. Neither has panned out. Now, IBM has settled on a humbler vision for Watson.