Delete comment from: Computational Complexity
I was guessing "binary digit", which is also a Tukey-ism, but even older.
If you check out the Wikipedia entry for Tukey, it says "The term "software", which Paul Niquette claims he coined in 1953[citation needed], was first used in print by Tukey in a 1958 article in American Mathematical Monthly, and thus some attribute the term to him". (The Jeopardy! question was also 1958, by the way, at least judging from the Jeopardy! sites out there, which now make it look overwhelmingly as if Tukey defined the term "software").
John Prager of IBM just gave a talk at Columbia explaining much of the details of how Watson worked.
It does not have the entire web in memory. Its data's mostly derived from encyclopedias (including Wikipedia), gazzeteers and dictionaries (including WordNet); John said they also expanded these sources very conservatively with a bit of web crawling. There's a component that measures the reliability of the source from which the answer was gleaned.
Mar 31, 2011, 5:44:46 PM
Posted to Three Questions that I think Watson would have trouble with