IBM Watson
IBM's question-answering system that beat Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011; IBM later used the name for its commercial AI offerings.
IBM Watson was a room-sized question answering system built for natural language processing. Named after IBM’s first CEO Thomas J. Watson Sr., it was developed under David Ferrucci and ran the DeepQA software on 10 racks with 90 servers and 2,880 processor cores. Its knowledge came from Wikipedia, encyclopedias, dictionaries, religious texts, novels, plays, and Project Gutenberg books. During play it had no internet connection. Unlike a search engine returning document lists, Watson gave direct answers.
In February 2011 it beat Jeopardy! record champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, finishing with $77,147. IBM later used the Watson name for commercial offerings. See the article, the timeline entry, and the earlier Deep Blue match for context.