IBM is doing their next publicity stunt [1]after Deep Blue defeated Kasparov. Its interesting because the challenge of a computer is not actually searching and finding the answer, but understanding the "question" itself.
If you've watched Jeopardy [2], the twist is that you have to respond with the question to which the answer is revealed. While it would be easy for the human mind to understand what the "answer" should be, and the tougher part is association and recollection, I can see it being fairly complicated for a computer. The other point of interest is a computer's ability to answer questions posed in natural language. Natural language search is very hot right now, with a lot of players including Microsoft. One that looks fairly promising is the one by Wolfram [3]. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8021774.stm<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8025873.stm> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy%21> [2] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/24/wolfram-alpha-getting-a-public-preview-on-tuesday/ Kiran
