Watson is completely amazing. The differences between Jeopardy and chess are staggering. I'd even say that in the chess challenge, they could kind of cheat, Deep Blue had every 5 piece board configuration in a book and so if it could play to 5 pieces left then it knew how to play from there, humans have their look up optimized differently. If this technology can be generally applied, it just seems like a radical tool, radical for medicine, law, and probably revolutionary for other professions where access to information hasn't been as important.

That being said, a really really clever jeopardy playing machine just doesn't seem "intelligent" to me. Huge bounds forward, we're making progress, I'm not denying that but Watson isn't going to slurp in the works of Shakespeare and write down some original thoughts on it, comparing it to current events. Or contrast Wordsworth and Keats. Or suggest a new experiment to further identify envelope proteins on a virus. Or invent a new way to etch semiconductors even smaller than we currently are. Will we get there? Maybe, hopefully, maybe even in our life times, but this is comprehension and search, it's not inventing or creating yet. It seems like half the problem, maybe the easier half.

Still awesome, maybe in a few years we'll have Watsons we can access from our phones or something.