If you’re going to get a question wrong, you might as well do it with style. This young genius demonstrated panache throughout, including one of the gutsiest Double Jeopardy bets I’ve ever seen. No hesitation there. He ends it the right way. Click play – don’t read the thumbnail in the video until you see the whole thing. This kid has style, for sure. …

IBM’s Watson supercomputer had its first shot at Jeopardy last night, and, overall, it went well. Watson had a few moments that made me scratch my head — and it was clear near the end that Watson was having some trouble understanding the questions — but he did manage to tie with one of his human opponent. The oddest part, though, is that they refer to Watson as a “he” instead of an “it.” A few moments that stood out to me was that when Watson had his moment to choose his first question, he picked the Daily Double from the start. (Considering the odds of doing that, I think there might have been a glitch in…

Check this out. As you may or may not have already hit play, you may or may not already know that this is Watson, a computer by IBM that they’ve dubbed a ‘question answering system’. As horrifyingly uninteresting as that sounds, this is the closest I’ve come to a sense of ‘awe’ at the communication skills of a computer. Yeah, all Watson does is answer questions – he probably isn’t one for small talk. But the cool thing here is that Watson does it by interpreting natural language. How many computers do you know that are bad enough dudes to do that? Probably less than one. Slang, colloquialisms, and conversational…