Also, if there is anyone who thinks silicon valley has the smartest people around, this type of stuff should change your mind. Facebook is short trousers compared to this. and it's just a tech demo.
The real challenge behind Watson is the natural language parsing. Instead of abstracting information away from their sources(like a graph), sources seem to have been left intact in sentences in Watson's memory. Watson would read through this information in a way alike to how it interprets a question, and it would try to create links and possible answers based on connections in sentences from many sources(this gives thought on why pun questions are difficult for Watson). I can't speak on behalf of the mathematical implementation of the answer choices, but this is the high level way that Watson finds answers. Those videos talk about the cool stuff behind the algorithmic challenges of Watson.
So who wants to build a real Q/A site based on this? Call it hal-18000.
You'd have to learn it to deal with thick accents like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ . Honestly, I don't know if that's possible, no matter how much training you'd put into the machine.
This is what I don't get, why should be "language processing" tied to written text? Part of the answer I know, because it's easier for computers to parse, but other than that it doesn't make sense.
Watson is an impressive achievement, but there are quite a few companies in Silicon Valley whose engineers could pull this off. It's more a matter of how much money management feels like throwing at it. It's great publicity for IBM, which has to put in a lot more effort than most Silicon Valley companies in order to look cool, but can afford it.
There's driven and then there's Smart.
Here are the pictures: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/watson-jeopardy/?pid=...