During the show, Watson is read-only - meaning nothing gets written to its backend SONAS. After the show, Watson is powered down and the computer scientists go to work updating information and debugging it -- trying to figure out why it gave erroneous answers, such as choosing Toronto as the answer for a question about American city.

"I'm sure they're scratching their head on that one," Pearson said.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at , or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Mainframes and Supercomputers Topic Center.