Can you believe that IBM is 100 years old ?

IBM is celebrating 100 years of business in two ways:
(1) They have released a few promotional videos:



and

(2) They did a marvelous project with the Jeopardy TV quiz show showcasing their artificial intelligence research with a supercomputer that can play Jeopardy, which turns out to require some very fancy natural language processing to understand the puns and ambiguities in the questions.





I have enjoyed this celebration. The Jeopardy was especially fun. It showcased both the strengths and the weaknesses of the computer "brain" when compared to the human contestants. On the second night of the match, there was a question to identify a US city, whose two airports were named for a WW2 here and a WW2 battle, respectively. Watson's reply was "Toronto", which was of course wrong (the real answer, as I knew right away, was Chicago). Watson was very uncertain of that answer, but since this was a "final Jeopardy" question, passing was not an option. But Watson bet very little money on the question, so he did not lose very much of his commanding lead.