NOVA · Season 38 · Episode 13

“Smartest Machine on Earth”

Aired Thursday 10 February 2011

Jeopardy! challenges even the best human minds. Can a computer win the game? "Watson", an IBM computing system, is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge—taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent".

S38 E13 discussion