Maybe grant a fund to get someone to work on finishing the ACAH1 post-haste and kick off ACAH2 so better sowing and harvest predictions can be based on improved micro-climate insight. Food prices are not getting any better. An estimated 125 million more people were turned into deep poverty thanks to bad harvests and food speculators, to include institutional investors in the western world. An outrage.

Jeopardy! And IBM Announce Charities to Benefit from Watson Competition

For all things Watson.

I was really bluffed at Watson's performance.
The database Watson uses is 15 Terabytes memory. I can imagine that when active these 15 Terabytes are downloaded into RAM otherwise I cannot imagine Watson could react so fast. It has a few thousand cores and 70 Teraflop capability and this is not an immense value by todays standards. A top supercomputer has many Petaflops capability. I mean Watson is not a supercomputer and can challenge seriously two top human players in an open knowledge contest.
When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov It was a top supercomputer of his time working on a very constrained and strictly regulated game, and had time to play.
My thinking here is that Watson should as a next challenge try to beat the Turing test. I am convinced it has a chance if tweaked in the right direction.

"Behind Deep Blue", 2005, is an excellent book written by one of the program architects who designed the computer chess player that beat Gary Kasparov. The book is very well written, but his opinion is that the design of a chess-playing computer does not advance the goal of Artificial Intelligence to imitate or assist human thought, which was the original reason given for the push to write a chess-playing program back in the dawn age of cybernetics.

Another opinion of the author is that Gary Kasparov was the better player, but he was worried about playing Deep Blue and mistakenly believed the superstitions repeated dogmatically by many second-rate chess players who claimed to understand the strengths and weaknesses of computer chess programs. The real programmers never contradicted the public misinformation promulgated by these self-proclaimed 'experts'. After all, just like the fictional chess players in "The 64 Square Madhouse" by Fritz Leiber (?), they wanted to win any way they could. The author says that he felt relieved early in the first game when it became apparent that Kasparov was following poor advice. He recognized the types of moves advocated by these 'experts'. Had Kasparov simply played the way he did against other humans, he would have had better than 2 to 1 odds against Deep Blue. Of course, this is just his guess, not a proven fact.

The interesting thing to speculate about is whether the algorithms used in Watson can lead to useful software tools in the future. I don't know, but it seems more reasonable to hope for this from Watson than from Deep Blue.

Lawrence