IBM researchers are hard at work creating a computer that will match wits against humans on the television show Jeopardy. Compared to checkers, chess, or backgammon, playing Jeopardy would seem to be a hard task for a computer because language is such a fundamental part of answering the questions correctly.
I found this article on the subject, written by David Goldman of CNNMoney.com, to be both informative and entertaining.
In the spirit of Jeopardy — if Mr. Goldman is smart — if
the answer is “How David Goldman paid for his children’s
college tuition,” then the question surely should be, “With the hefty book
advance he received for the book that came out of the article he wrote on IBM taking on Jeopardy.”
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I would love to see the researchers figure out a way to do this. And then on their big debut forget to code in the computer to answer as a question and lose horribly. For some reason I find this scenario hilariously funny.
What is not evident to anybody watching the show but is painfully evident to anybody who’s ever played and lost is that Jeopardy is not a contest of trivia knowledge, but of reaction time. Anybody who goes on the show has to pass a battery of tests and could probably best most of their friends and family at Trivial Pursuit, but it’s only people who master the buzzer who end up having a shot at winning.
Ironically, this is the easiest part of the game for a computer to master, and something at which no human could ever beat it.