[jtmckinley]

My $0.02: The important thing with IBM's Watson is the natural language processing and then the analytic software behind that question understanding and to be able give an answer and weight the probability that it is the correct answer, all within a couple of seconds so as not to "push the button" if the possible answer has a low probability of being correct. There's also some analytic processing in deciding how much to bet on the answer. In any event, I think this is a HUGE achievement in natural language processing, analytic processing and parallel processing. The specs on this beast are pretty amazing but even more amazing is the software IMHO, especially the parallelism of it.