Remember The Computer That Won At Jeapordy?

Click on the image at the right to see the full image.  For those of you not familiar with the term format, the idea is that by performing the syntax that the two humans have written, the hard disk of a computer would be erased.

So, by performing the command, the computer opponent inadvertently lost the game because he formatted his own hard-drive!

Watson brings up an interesting discussion about computing and where computers are headed.  Obviously this computer only gained its understanding through reading a lot of human generated content—there wasn’t anything here that needed mathematics, for instance, to solve.

At what point could a machine be considered learning on its own?  Could a machine eventually be considered sentient?

I mean, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, they argued that Commander Data could be considered sentient, but I’m not sure that anything we created would eventually be able to be considered that sophisticated.  While I’m aware that a computer could learn, I’m not sure that it could actually come up with anything new that was intelligible.