Come on, outside of these academic exercises, IBM is now just a giant consulting firm.

umm yeah giant as in $100 billion in revenue and about $15 billion in net income. Not a bad business at all. I should hope to be so boring.

With over $10 billion a year in hardware sales.

$30M to build Watson to buy all this PR is brilliant. As was Deep Blue.

I just hope the next challenge isn't "defeat a standing army"

academic exercise? you call a turing prize or a nobel prize an academic exercise?

I'm just cracking wise. Watson is a very impressive project. Nonetheless, throw four to seven Google researchers and engineers at this project and you'd achieve comparable results. They've been cornering the market in this area.

But instant button pressing is not terribly impressive and yet is Watson's critical advantage. This match is framed as a battle of knowledge, not a struggle for humans to overcome the massive disadvantage of their meat-based nervous system, which it is.

This is largely glossed over. Watson would lose horribly if one of its engineers was pressing the button. If its electronic advantage on the button was taken away, it would be the kind of fascinating match I and a lot of people were expecting.

Google actually does do open-domain fact-based question answering for queries like:

"what is the capital of china"

which are probably closest to Jeopardy questions (technically speaking.)

The team that does this is a lot more than seven Google engineers. Yet, it is not the top selling features of Google, because -- it's not that easy.

There is a fine line between "seems easy" and "nearly impossible". A Google engineer does not equate to infinite skills.

Yes, watson can play Jeopardy. Jennings and Rutter can also do every other thing that a human being can do. The meat based system is still, on the measure, much more impressive.