Unless IBM's Watson can do more than play Jeopardy!, Garry Kasparov sees it as little more than a complicated toy.

That's what the Russian world chess champion said when asked for his thoughts on last week's Jeopardy! contest between two champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and IBM's new Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer. Kasparov reviewed the three-day contest and offered his initial thoughts exclusively to The Atlantic.

What else could a supercomputer do, Gary? How about play chess?

Awesome stuff.

The idea is that you’ve got hundreds of machines out there,” Rinard says. “We’re saying, ‘Okay, fine, you can take out six or 10 of my 200 machines.’” But, he adds, “by observing what happens with the executions of those six or 10 machines, we’ll be able to deploy patches out to protect the rest of the machines.” The entire process of recognizing an attack, testing a number of countermeasures and deploying the most effective ones can take a matter of seconds.

Very interesting research. I'm curious as to how it'd work with only one or a handful of computers, though. There you wouldn't get the benefit of being able to learn from a few systems falling.