Everything in this world is relative, my dear Watson.

I found this article about Watson - an IBM's super computer that not only is able to play Jeopardy game, but also wins against human contestants. Enjoy the full article and video here: IBM's Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy practice round.

It's truly astounding.

On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.

Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"

In my humble opinion this citation fits here perfectly. Because every news like this brings the following question: "Will machines ever be able not only to merely act intelligently but also comprehend the world and their own actions?". That is still an open questions.

Cheers!

PS. By the way: it felt somewhat amazing when David Gondek, a member of Watson development team, said that their experts background is in natural language processing, information retrival, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning. Why amazing? Well, just last week I had exams in half of those disciplines.

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21 Feb 2011 Edit:
I also found this new article [PL] and a really nice video [EN] with explanation. Again - purely amazing!

Cheers again!