Watson (a computer) plays Jeopardy!

Why is that surprising? The organization and storage of factual data may be time consuming and the interpretation of language can be complex, but it does not require human thought.
 
It didn't seem that impressive to me either but apparently Jeopardy has lots of word plays and cleaver questions that would be hard on a computer. Of course I've still never seen an answer where the question didn't start with "who is" or "what is" so the original concept seems to have completely failed to live up to it's potential since the whole "answer must be phrased as a question" thing just becomes "you forgot to say what is before answering the question". They may as well make contestants say sausage or recite a tongue twister before answering the question, especially given how terrible the match between the question and answer so often are. A better answer in almost all cases would be "recite some esoteric fact about..." or "What does almost no one know about..."

But back on topic statistical algorithms do seem to be the way forward for AIs. I remember reading an article about the DARPA robot car challenge and how contestants built statistical models to solve problems in it (I.e. In which direction am I most likely to win the race and least likely to hit something.). Very cool stuff.
 
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