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Can we make a robot that really thinks, learns, and acts like us? Replicating the human brain is a lot tougher than it looks; the promise of walking, talking “androids” is still just a fantasy. But scientists are edging closer with machines like Watson, an IBM computer that is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge: Taking on human contestants on the game show JEOPARDY! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of more than a billion entries, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is providing new insight into the brain itself, and showing AI researchers that there’s more than one way to be “intelligent.”

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