Watson

Watson is a question answering computer system that IBM built to understand questions posed in natural language, named after the company's founder, Thomas J. Watson. The idea was conceived in 2004, seven years after IBM's chess computer Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov. In initial tests in 2006, David Ferrucci, senior manager of IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration department, gave the system 500 clues from past Jeopardy! programs, and it answered only about 15 percent correctly. In 2007, Ferrucci's team at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, began…