I have a feeling this is a thankless job for IBM. It's a very, very hard problem, and the majority of the population probably doesn't understand just how hard a problem this is for a computer to solve. When the computer does respectably, but doesn't totally dominate the game, most people will probably laugh at the computer.

Clever computer answers Jeopardy questions? I think not - shouldn't take a great deal of processing to map the lexical items and grammatical structures from the given info in order to arrive at a possible answer or at least a range of good guesses.

No, what I would like to see is a computer that can solve a cryptic crossword like The Times, for instance. In fact, if a computer could do that without just using pattern matching, then I reckon it'd be a good candidate for beating the Turing test.

Then again, I don't believe the American press carry cryptic crosswords (in the UK sense), so maybe the IBM boffins just aren't aware of how challenging they can be.

...When they build one that can work out what amanfrommars is saying, I'll be impressed :)

We received an email about this yesterday - the part I loved was "this challenge is even more daunting than chess due to its broad range of subject matter, the speed at which accurate answers must be provided and the need to analyze clues containing irony, riddles and other subtleties of human thought and expression"

Irony ? Won't be developed in the US then

And my suggestion trick question : "what colour top is the person to your left wearing?"

My theory is that amanfrommars is the prototype for this...