The gameshow winning supercomputer that couldn’t stop saying ‘bull****’: IBM forced to wipe hard drive after machine downloaded an urban dictionary

Artificial intelligence machine Watson began swearing after memorising the contents of the Urban Dictionary

It was fed the repository of colloquial English in a bid to equip it with the knowledge to pass the Turing test of computer intelligence

But researchers were forced to wipe the dictionary from the machine's memory after it started giving backchat to researchers

An IBM supercomputer had to have its memory wiped because its programmers could find no other way to stop him swearing.

Artificial intelligence Watson, which famously won Jeopardy! against the game show's human champions, kept making obscene outbursts after memorising the contents of the Urban Dictionary .

The website is a repository of English-language slang, and inevitably includes a range of profanities and insults completely inappropriate for polite conversation.

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How the mighty have fallen: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter compete against IBM's Watson AI in a special edition of Jeopardy! in 2011. The machine had to have its memory wiped because it wouldn't stop swearing

But Watson proved incapable of mastering the subleties of good mannered repartee and, after he began uttering obscenities, his masters were forced to delete the taboo vocabulary.

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, specifically developed to answer questions on TV quiz show Jeopardy!

He competed on the programme against two former winners in 2011, and romped home with the $1million first prize.

For the show, Watson had access to 200million pages of content - including the full text of Wikipedia - but was not connected to the Internet while playing.

Eric Brown, the IBM research scientist in charge of tutoring Watson, had taught the computer the Urban Dictionary in an effort to make his communications seem more natural, Fortune reported.

It was an attempt to give Watson the knowledge he needed to pass the so-called Turing test, which gauges whether a computer can really 'think' by whether it is capable of carrying on natural sounding small talk.

But while Watson hungrily scoffed as much knowledge as he was offered, Mr Brown, 45, found that that his microprocessor-based pupil had much more difficulty understanding the subleties of human communication.

It was after he started answering 'bullsh*t' back to human researchers that it was decided to pull the plug on attempts to teach Watson slang.

Full of obscenities: The home page of the Urban Dictionary. The site is a repository of colloquial language and includes many inventive profanities, insults and otherwise impolite forms of language

Mr Brown's team had to wipe the Urban Dictionary from the computer's memory and develop a linguistic filter to keep him from swearing again.

The failed experiment seems to back up the contention by John Searle, the U.S. analytic philosopher, that Watson - despite undoubtedly impressive capabilities - cannot actually think.

Based on his Chinese room thought experiment, Searle claims Watson, like other computers, is capable only of manipulating symbols with no understanding of what they actually mean.

The Chinese Room experiment, first posed by Searle in 1980, supposes there is a computer program that gives a computer the ability of carry on an intelligent conversation in written Chinese.

If the program's processes are executed by hand by someone who speaks only English then, in theory, that person would also be able to carry on a conversation in written Chinese.

However, the English speaker would not be able to understand the conversation, just as a computer executing the program would only be merely offering responses based on pre-determined instructions, rather than based on its own understanding.