Yesterday the victory of IBM's Watson was aired on national television as the AI program beat two of the most renowned winners of Jeopardy!, record holders Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in the ultimate test of "natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering." [Read more on Watson and the DeepQA research project on IBM's website].
While some of us still remember the first developments of chess-playing computers and the such, AI has evolved at an outstanding rate through the years and has become more and more involved in our daily lives.
For a pick on a brief history of AI milestones,
For more on Watson and the program's contribution in
developing AI technologies, visit www.ibm.com/watson
Finally, an article comparing IBM's Deep Blue's technology