How IBM Plans to Win Jeopardy!

Watson, a computer system that will play Jeopardy!, the popular TV trivia game show, against human contestants.

Demonstrations of the system are expected this year, with a final televised matchup--complete with hosting by the show's Alex Trebek--sometime next year. Questions will be spoken aloud by Trebek but fed into the machine in text format during the show.

the system breaks a question into pieces, searches its own databases for "related knowledge," and then finally makes connections to assemble a result

Meanwhile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will soon announce the participants chosen to take part in a five-year research effort aimed at advancing the state of natural-language processing

Whether or not IBM's Watson beats humans on Jeopardy! next year, the DARPA project will surely push the field ahead