He was joking, but not by much. In a , the winner of 74 consecutive Jeopardy matches (until he met his match in Watson) writes:

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Watson seems to represent a giant leap forward in the field of natural-language processing -- the ability to understand and respond to everyday English, the way Ask Jeeves did (with uneven results) in the dot-com boom. "Jeopardy" clues cover an open domain of human knowledge -- every subject imaginable -- and are full of booby traps for computers: puns, slang, wordplay, oblique allusions. But in just a few years, Watson has learned -- yes, it learns -- to deal with some of the myriad complexities of English. When it sees the word "Blondie," it's very good at figuring out whether "Jeopardy" means the cookie, the comic strip, or the new-wave band.

Yeah, sure, it helps that success in "Jeopardy" depends a great deal on how fast you can press a buzzer with your thumb -- and there is no faster thumb than a "electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current." And yes, we can take some small solace in the fact that Watson occasionally got things very wrong -- confusing the cities of Chicago and Toronto, for example, and "The Elements of Style" with author Dorothy Parker. (The New Atlantis has a of what Watson missed and why -- presumably written by a human.)

But mostly, we're toast, and it doesn't even necessarily take a supercomputer with 2,880 CPUs and a 15-terabyte database to spread the butter. As uber math geek , your average search engine will do.