My observations on tonight's competition:
The way Watson "sniped" the daily double immediately upon taking control of the board was very interesting to me. I suspect that it was programmed with a statistical distribution of past daily doubles (this site strongly suggests that their placement is not random). Otherwise, its behavior seems inconsistent, given that afterward it went after the 200-point question in each category, presumably in order to get a better read on the qualities of each category.
Its lack of audio input led it to repeat a wrong answer, which was one (probably predictable) flaw. It had trouble with the decades and alternate word meanings, which isn't surprising given the explanation that its algorithms are based on word association. Also, it needs to read more Harry Potter.
this about maps with the issues I noticed. Looking forward to the next 2 days of this.
It was mentioned before on LessWrong, but I feel people might appreciate a reminder:
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/what-is-watson/countdown-to-jeopardy.html
It's a bit of a cheesy PR thing - I'd be a lot more interested if they connected the program on the Internet and allowed anyone to try and ask them general questions, rather than mixing the program with voice recognition and (heh) buzzer-pushing. Trivia tests are also probably one of the easier challenges to deal with, since keyword filtering alone is very efficient in narrowing down the candidate space.
Still, I'm going to watch it if I can: if anybody knows of a streaming link that is accessible to non-US viewers, that would be appreciated.
(Silly aside: is anyone else annoyed by how "Jeopardy" pretends to invert the traditional question-answer format, while what it does is simply moving the "what is" from the former to the latter, even if the result makes no sense? I suppose to US people this is a rather old complaint, but I learnt about the show today and I'm rather bugged by this feature.)