Millions of viewers were glued to the screen as Watson methodically annihilated its opponents on national TV, answering questions that stumped the rival contestants, and thereby claiming the $1 million prize money.IBM pulled out all the stops in assembling a machine with a truly monumental amount of computational firepower. Watson can process data at the astonishing rate of five hundred gigabytes per second (or the equivalent of a million books per second) with sixteen trillion bytes of RAM memory. It also had access to two hundred million pages of material in its memory, including the entire storehouse of knowledge within Wikipedia. Watson could then analyze this mountain of information on live TV.Watson is just the latest generation of “expert systems,” software programs that use formal logic to access vast amounts of specialized information. (When you talk on the phone to a machine that gives you a menu of choices, this is a primitive expert system.) Expert systems will continue to evolve, making our lives more convenient and efficient.For example, engineers are currently working to create a “robo-doc,”
