First chess, now Jeopardy?

IBM is working on a Jeopardy-playing computer that can beat human contestants. Though it can't yet beat the best human players, it's pretty amazing that it can do everything it needs to do. Consider:

Without being connected to the Internet, the computer has to understand natural language, determine the answer to a question (or, in the case of Jeopardy, the question to an answer), and then calculate the odds that its answer is correct in order to decide whether it is worth buzzing in.

The fear of getting a question wrong and losing money prevents many a wrong answer from a human Jeopardy contestant. At the same time, humans often instinctively know they know the answer to a question, even if it doesn't pop into their heads right away. So a human Jeopardy player will often click the buzzer upon hearing the question, and then spend the next several seconds pulling the answer out of the memory bank. To compete on Jeopardy, a computer must determine whether it knows the correct response within seconds.

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