Some influential tech voices deeply critical of today's search technology hailed the victory of IBM's Watson at Jeopardy! as a forerunner of a new type of more intelligent, useful and less spammy search. Here's why that's still an awfully long ways off.
It's all over but the shouting, when it comes to the highly-publicized, man vs. machine contest on Jeopardy! But a debate has surfaced over whether IBM's Watson supercomputer had a built-in advantage in the event, when it came to buzzing-in answers to clues.
If nobody's perfect, same goes for computers. Big Blue's digital dynamo Watson may have handily defeated its human rivals this week on the Jeopardy! challenge, but it made some major errors along the way. IBM's engineers have been posting post-mortems about that on the Internet.
For Watson, it was elementary. IBM's mighty supercomputer has landed the title of new Jeopardy! champ. No matter how hard Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings -- the two human contestants pitted against the machine -- tried, they were just no match for the brainy Watson.