Many of you will have seen or heard of the recent appearance of
IBM's Watson computer as a contestant on Jeopardy. The first
show aired on February 14th, 2011 -- the 65th anniversary of the
debut of ENIAC. The performance of Watson on Jeopardy was
fantastic. The computational challenge was enormous -- Jeopardy
was selected precisely because of its complex linguistic
difficulties -- and Watson achieved great success. Watson
crushed his human competitors. In fairness to humans, it
appeared that Watson had a nearly unbeatable advantage to buzz
in first. That aside, Watson had the right answer to almost
every question. This was a breathtaking feat, demonstrating his
ability to take in a verbal question and output the correct
answer in very short time, using on-board data and programmed
smarts. The IBM and computer science cheerleading that went
along with this special Jeopardy program was, if anything,
understated -- this type of interactive system will have
enormous impact in many fields. Medicine is certainly o