[andrewce]

My college didn't have a college bowl team, but competing on high school teams and being responsible for more than a few correct two or three word answers, I can vouch for this.

It's all about having enough breadth that the other bits of information presented can help whittle down answers by way of association and relationships. Good trivia players rely quite a bit on intuition.

Ken Jennings mentioned (in his book) how Jeopardy! often has questions about rivers, so it was a fairly simple matter to just memorize river names and some basic associations with which to answer questions.

It seems like Watson is mostly a really sophisticated algorithm on top of lots of brute force (2880 processors?!). Though I guess it could also be said that humans are just ugly bags of mostly water.

That said: in something like medicine (differential diagnoses), such a system could also be extremely useful, given the frequent occurrence of a fairly limited number of "answers".

[mkramlich]

> It seems like Watson is mostly a really sophisticated algorithm on top of lots of brute force (2880 processors?!). Though I guess it could also be said that humans are just ugly bags of mostly water.

Arguably Ken Jennings is mostly a really sophisticated algorithm on top of lots of brute force (billions of neurons?). And computers are just pretty blocks of mostly silicon. :)

[nooneelse]

It could also make a decent living in tech support too.

[WalterBright]

I had the same thought. I think Watson would make a fabulous resource for medical diagnoses. It also shouldn't just give the "answer", but the top 10 or so matches along with their probabilities.