Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists who set out to accomplish a grand challenge - build a computing system that rivals a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. The Jeopardy! format provides the ultimate challenge because the game’s clues involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities in which humans excel and computers traditionally do not.

Traditional computing systems are built to analyze only structured data,or to run analytics in batch reporting jobs. But today’s businesses require the same kind of information consumption, advanced analytics and real-time response that is needed to answer questions on Jeopardy! Read more.