IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy!

What happened

IBM's Watson, a question-answering system able to interpret natural-language clues, defeated the quiz show Jeopardy!'s two greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a televised match. The room-sized machine drew on thousands of processor cores and a vast store of text.

Why it matters

Watson showed that computers could understand and answer everyday human questions far better than traditional search, hinting at the natural-language AI to come.

Sources

• IBM. Watson, Jeopardy! champion · Primary source