'Jeopardy!' Pits Man Against IBM Computer In Round 1

First of all I'm not sure what you mean by "It is not however able to think for itself." Its been programmed like any software but it seems to me it does "think for itself". When it sees the Jeopardy answer no programmer guides it in any way as to how to select or rate the possible questions. It is completely autonomous­.



I guess lets put it this way if you count what the humans are doing when they play Jeopardy as "thinking for themselves­" then Watson certainly also thinks for itself.



If on the other hand you mean Watson isn't conscious I agree but that is not the definition of AI. It may be the way that the term is used in movies but in universiti­es people create artificial intelligen­ce software all the time and to my knowledge no one has ever claimed that their software was conscious nor has anyone ever used that as a requiremen­t for AI software. AI includes natural language processing and knowledge that spans the complete domain of human experience (AI researcher­s call this common sense reasoning an especially hard problem) Watson is definitely AI.
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