With a full, inverse-indexed, cross-linked, de-duplicated version of Wikipedia all in RAM, even a single server, with a few cores, can run hundreds of iteratively-refined probe queries, and scan the full-text of articles for sentences that correlate with the clue, in the seconds it takes Trebek to read the clue.
That makes me think that if you gave a leaner, younger, hungrier team millions of dollars and years to mine the entire history of Jeopardy answers-and-questions for workable heuristics, they could match Watson’s performance with a tiny fraction of Watson’s hardware.
Unfortunately, Jeopardy didn’t open this as a general challenge to all, like the DARPA Grand Challenges, with a large prize to motivate creative entries. Jeopardy seems to have simply followed IBM’s lead – and perhaps even received promotional payments from IBM for doing so. (I can’t find a definitive statement either way.)
Computers may be able to solve problems and produce usable search results using complicated algorithms, but I’ve yet to see one that can come up with fresh ideas.
That’s why a continued push for innovation and creativity may not only be important for the U.S. economy, it may also be what saves us in the soon-to-come “Robot Wars of 2069″!