IBM's Jeopardy Strategy: Divide And Conquer

jfruhlinger writes: Developing a computer that could play chess once seemed like a worthy AI goal — but it turned out to be something of a dead end, as chess is very abstract and simple when compared to the real world. Will creating a game-show-playing computer lead to more interesting results? IBM hopes so, and its Watson machine will tackle problems in parallel processing, data searching, and natural language comprehension in an attempt to beat Jeopardy legends Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. (Full discolsure: the submitter of this article went on Jeopardy and lost, badly.)