But what would Watson make of this smart-alecky remark? The question-answering algorithms that IBM developed to allow Watson to compete on Jeopardy! might lead it to conjecture that it has something to do with The Simpsons -- since the full text of Wikipedia is among its 15 terabytes of reference data, and the Kent Brockman page explains the Overlord Meme. After all, Watson's mechanical thumb had beaten Ken and Brad's real ones to the buzzer on a Simpsons clue earlier in the game (identifying the show as the home of Itchy and Scratchy). But beyond its Simpsonian pedigree, this complex use of language would be entirely opaque to Watson. Humans, on the other hand, have no problem identifying how such a snowclone works, appreciating its humorous resonances, and constructing new variations on the theme.

All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon. The "war" metaphor, incidentally, had been playing out for weeks, stoked by IBM and Jeopardy! to build public interest in the tournament. The press gladly played along, supplying headlines like the one in the Science Times from Tuesday, "A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans." IBM knew from the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue days that we're all suckers for the "man vs. machine" trope, going back to John Henry's mythical race against the steam-powered hammer. It certainly makes for a better storyline than, say, "Check out the latest incremental innovations that Natural Language Processing researchers are making in the field of question-answering!"

I first encountered IBM's hype about the tournament last month, during the NFL's conference championship games, when Dave Ferrucci, the ebullient lead engineer on the project, showed up in commercial breaks to tell us about the marvels of Watson. One commercial intriguingly opens with Groucho Marx telling his classic joke: "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I don't know." Ferrucci then begins: "Real language is filled with nuance, slang and metaphor. It's more than half the world's data. But computers couldn't understand it." He continues: "Watson is a computer that uncovers meaning in our language, and pinpoints the right answer, instantly. It uses deep analytics to answer questions computers never could before, even the ones on Jeopardy!" Then a Jeopardy! clue is displayed: "Groucho quipped, 'One morning I shot' this 'in my pajamas.'"

Now, that's a provocative set of claims. Watson's performance in the tournament (despite a few howlers along the way) clearly demonstrates that it is very skilled in particular types of question-answering, and I have no doubt it could handle that Groucho clue with aplomb. But does that mean that Watson "understands" the "nuance, slang and metaphor" of natural language? That it "uncovers meaning in our language"? Depends what you mean by "meaning," and how you understand "understanding."