You aren't joking. I took a few minutes and wrote up a bayesian engine in mathematica. I've got a pretty good start on that already, and as the IBM stuff notes it's embarrassingly parallel. It seems to me the entire problem is parsing. If you can parse well and feed a well formed input to your data layer (and you've fed it enough data) you're golden.

So who wants to build a real Q/A site based on this? Call it hal-18000.