All hail our computer overlords..

I love it that the computer beat the people in a game of jeopardy, not because I am some weird techno-nihilist but because I can appreciate the work that went into it, years and years of work. 

Computational linguistics is the field I'm working in currently, it's a fascinating field and it's really, really hard to make software that can truly understand and act on human communication. We all forget that the reason we can understand one another is that we've had a life-time of experience and learning doing it, we understand nuance, pun, humour, allegory, irony etc. without really thinking about it (well, unless you're American) and for a machine to understand it we need to almost codify "human life" and put it somewhere that can be accessed instantaneously from any direction, not easy. With this showcase it looks like the folks at IBM are making strides in the field although the equipment they used is beyond the reach of mere mortals currently (I'm physically drooling at the specifications) of course, that will gradually change over time, exciting stuff.