What the deuce, Watson?

WHEN the 2016 Wimbledon Championships start on June 27th millions of tennis fans will begin posting on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram about everything from the matches to the attire, hairdos and headbands of their favourite players. The contest's organiser, the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), would quite like to know what the hottest topics are. So it is using a powerful computer to find out. That computer is Watson, an IBM machine which in 2011 famously won the American TV quiz "Jeopardy!" and nowadays resides as a cloud-computing service. The idea, says Alexandra Willis, the AELTC's digital supremo, is to use its machine learning and natural language-processing techniques to discover the most pressing topics of conversation among the vast output from fans. Knowing that, the club's editorial team--which provides content for Wimbledon's mobile app, its website and its video feeds--can respond quickly with relevant articles, posts, tweets, statistics and images.