Watson in Jeopardy

As we all know, IBM held its global partner conference in Orlando this week.

Aside from its plethora of cloud announcements and general partner news, Big Blue has also been touting its latest supercomputer - nicknamed Watson.

Not since Deep Blue (the size of a large fridge/freezer) beat chess giant Garry Kasparov has an intelligent computer caused such a ruckus.

This machine - far smaller and lighter than Deep Blue - was pitted against winning contestants from US quiz show Jeopardy, and demonstrated how not only does it have all the answers, but it can work out clues and think for itself.

I think it was absolutely creaming its human competitors the last I heard.

I was even told that a version of this machine can be sold through channel partners as a super powerful (but affordable) business tool.

Quite scary when you think he these things are developing, particularly if you have watched Robocop or other similar AI type movies.

Of course Watson is a very benign and generous computer - he will be giving all his Jeopardy winnings away to charity.

This time.