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8 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? Philip Glass. The compositions would get a reasonable technical score in an exam, better than many of my attempts, but are these compositions truly art? There's no question computers are gaining ground on us in certain mathematically oriented tasks — playing chess, musical composition, and various modeling tasks. But attempts to have them work with words and ideas have generally produced dismal results. Until now. In 2008, IBM unveiled Watson: a computer capable of answering general knowledge questions. Watson has an enormous database of human knowledge: the Encyclopedia Britannica, a billion web pages, the entire text of Wikipedia and millions of books. It uses artificial intelligence to trawl through this vast reservoir of knowledge and answer questions using a statistical approach. In 2011, Watson featured as a contestant on Jeopardy, the American quiz show, where it beat the two record-holding contestants — the one with the highest number of wins and the one with most consecutive wins. Let me give you a few sample questions and see how you fare. Question 1. It can mean to develop gradually in the mind or to carry during pregnancy. Question 2. William Wilkinson's “An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia” inspired this author's most famous Novel. Question 3. __Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle. Watson answered questions one and two correctly but failed on question three. You can probably see the final question is posed in poorly structured English and this threw off Watson’s comprehension algorithm. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015698