Computer beats Jeopardy champs

That would have been very sporting of them as I recall seeing an interview with Jeopardy winners where they mentioned the crucial role the buzzer plays in the game and how skill with it provides a competitive advantage.

I want to see it go on 'are you smarter than a fifth grader'. The sorts of questions they should ask aren't ones that require knowledge but creativity, understanding, and elision of concepts. For example:

If Dog is three and elephant is eight then what is ostrich?

Guarantee a fifth grader gets seven, but Watson is stumped.

I have watched Jeopardy. It's questions are no more obscurely worded than what my mom types into a search engine. The search engine is often able to produce reasonable results, which is impressive in isolation and I recognize the difficulty of that, but not something to make a huge PR event out of, as there are many applications with similar parsing ability (like search engines).

Jeopardy always words something in the same format with a lot of information about the answer. Perhaps I am too far removed, but to me it doesn't seem like a huge advance in natural language research or anything worth all this attention. It's clearly a PR event purchased by IBM to try to sell more software along that line, hardly revolutionary.

Yes, but that's the point, it doesn't actually "understand". When it answers a question in the category of "rhyme time" it's not because it actually understands what a rhyme is, but because it's been programmed to. If Jeopardy renamed the rhyme time category "time rhyme" (requiring the contestant to rhyme AND invert) watson would be up the creek, whereas someone like Ken Jennings could probably even figure it out without Alex Trebek explaining the category, and you or I would figure out the scheme after flubbing the first one.