Computationally, my dear Watson

[image error]The New York Times has an excellent article on IBM's 'Watson' project which is an artificial intelligence system designed to answer natural language queries to the point where it can beat humans at Jeopardy! quiz show questions - where contestants are given an answer and they have to come up with the question.

Natural language questions are traditionally very difficult for computers because they involve a lot of assumptions. For example, take the question "How many people work in a bank?". To ...