How Much Artificial Intelligence Does IBM Watson Have?

Watson started as a follow-on project to IBM DeepBlue, the computer and AI program that defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov. DeepBlue demonstrated that a computer could defeat a human in chess, a game with well-defined rules and limited, fully visible solutions. The real world, however, is much more complicated: information often is unstructured, problems ill defined, and solutions probabilistic at best. To equip AI to deal with the real world, IBM challenged its computer and data scientists to create a program that could defeat human contestants at Jeopardy!, a quiz show requiring answers to natural language questions over broad domains of knowledge otherwise known as unstructured data. As a quick refresher, artificial intelligence can be divided into three categories, as shown above.1The