Watson is a computer system like no other ever built. It analyzes natural language questions and content well enough and fast enough to compete and win against champion players at Jeopardy!

This is no easy task for a computer, given the need to perform over an enormously broad domain, with consistently high precision and amazingly accurate confidence estimations in the correctness of its answers.

Watson’s performance on Jeopardy! is just the opening salvo for a research mission built on decades of experience in deep Content Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

For a detailed explanation of how Watson works, see our special issue This is Watson published in the IBM Journal of Research and Development.