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IBM's Watson Delivers, but His Web Site Doesn't

The IBM Watson supercomputer seems to be able to beat the best humans in Jeopardy. But his web site isn't faring nearly as well. The web site hosting IBM's post-match commentary blog, asmarterplanet.com, was experiencing availability problems Tuesday evening.


Thus far the IBM Watson supercomputer seems to be able to beat the best humans in Jeopardy. But his web site isn't faring nearly as well. The web site hosting IBM's post-match commentary blog, asmarterplanet.com, was experiencing availability problems Tuesday evening, even as IBM was using its Twitter feeds to drive traffic to the site. Curiously, asmarterplanet.com appears to be hosted at Media Temple, a Los Angeles web host used by many leading blog sites, instead of on IBM servers.

Thus, some Twitter users trying to read an analysis from IBM researcher David Ferrucci about Watson's curious wrong answer during Final Jeopardy (Toronto?) instead got an "unable to connect" message. The IBM blog came back online by about 8:45 p.m Eastern time (the Jeopardy broadcast ended at 7:30 pm Eastern).

The web site glitch is unlikely to spoil what must be a heady moment for Big Blue, as Watson dominated the second day of matches on Jeopardy. The human champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, get their final crack at Watson on Wednesday evening's broadcast of Jeopardy. Can Ken and Brad bounce back? Or is it time to admit defeat at the hands of our new robotic game show overlord? Go to our online poll and vote.

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