Insights and Inside Info on IBM's meat-killing Jeopardy machine

Much of the power comes from IBM's carefully curated collection of data. Jennifer Chu-Carroll, one of the scientists who has worked on the project since it began over four years ago, says that Watson excels, predictably enough, when the answer is a detail stored in its database.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/business-intelligenceanalytics/how-ibms-watson-hammered-its-jeopardy-foes-798?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2011-02-16

Corollary article:

Lest we get too enamored with our technological prowess, however, the authors make some comparisons with biology. “To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*10¹⁸ instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/world-computer-data/