IBM's Jeopardy! Stunt Computer Is Curing Cancer Now

Over a three-day period in February, millions of people watched as the supercomputer steadily triumphed over Jennings and Rutter, beating the men at complicated clues like "A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called this'of the Hedgehog'?" You don't have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up" (response: "What is narcolepsy?"). Watson also made some funny mistakes, like when it responded "What Is Toronto?????" to a clue about the names of a city's airports, while his human opponents correctly met the prompt with "What is Chicago?" In the end, Watson racked up $77,147 to Jennings's and Rutter's respective $24,000 and $21,600; IBM was awarded $1 million to give to charity; Jennings jokingly welcomed "our new computer overlords"; and Jeopardy!got a ratings spike. At the time, IBM was estimated to have spent somewhere between $900 million and $1.8 billion developing Watson's artificial-intelligence technology and, as far as the public could see, all the company had to show for it was an elaborate parlor trick. "IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek," wrote Jennings in a Slate pieceabout his encounter with the machine. "The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson." Five years later, that future appears to be knocking at the door. While Watson's servers and memory have the capacity to process the entire American Library of Congress, the system, as IBM research head John Kelly put it to Charlie Rose on a recent 60 Minutes, "has no inherent intelligence as it starts.