Yes.
In my early years I watched the "moving target" which artificial intelligence had become. Everybody had their own ideas of what would constitute "intelligence". As soon as people understood how to accomplish any given level of performance, the definition shifted to something more challenging. People were never impressed by a machine accomplishing something that they could understand.
Playing championship level chess is one example. Once it was done, people treat it like the brute force effort that it was. The computers, being able to analyze millions of positions per second, only needed a little algorithmic help to prune the search trees to make the most of that ability. People were not so impressed when they understood how it was done.
Recognizing that effect, I decided to change my personal definition of "arificial intelligence". It is any accomplishment by artificial means which CANNOT be fully understood.
I would assume that Watson maintained a "log" of its activities during the competition. Searching through that log, it should be possible for the creators of Watson to figure out what went wrong and to make corrections so that in future Watson will know the answer to that question. (Or, more correctly, the question to that answer.)
At some point in the future it will become impractical to make or examine such an activity log. At that point, we will have created artificial intelligence. Just as with real intelligence, it won't be correct all the time. And just as real intelligence, it won't be possible to understand exactly how it works.
I'm willing to believe that such an intelligence may require an artificial brain perhaps orders of magnitude more complex than the human brain.
The term ‘artificial intelligence’ has been misapplied for years.
I remember First Gen AI, then 2nd, then 3rd, then 4th.
IBM came to our worksite to demo a 4th Gen AI program. It had a list of questions that you supplied data for, and then it calculated the cost of your insurance based on that ‘data’. I laughed at it and them, because I had an ANALOG COMPUTER made out of plastic and wires back when I was a kid, and it could do the same thing.
NOW, that being said, there were some other ‘programs’ that I ran into on other computers (D.E.C.) that gave the appearance of ‘intelligence’.
The first was a program call DUNGEON. It was Dungeons and Dragons and you played it by simply typing in what you wanted to do. The reason I thought it was AI was because it could parse whatever you typed in and give a response. It was pretty darn good at figuring out what you ‘meant’.
The other program was on the VAX mainframes back at DEC headquarters. I didn’t know about it until several years after I started working with a DEC Minicomputer. I had to place many service calls, and always thought the person on the other end was very friendly, helpful, and easy to talk to.
One day, one of the C.E’s (customer engineers) from DEC came out to work on our PDP 11/70 (DEC minicomputer) and somehow we got around to talking about AI and VOICE recognition software, and voice output from computers.
That was when he told me that the ‘person’ I called at DEC to place my service call, wasn’t a person at all. It was a program on the VAX. I can tell when I hear a computer generated ‘voice’ on the phone, but I couldn’t tell that the DEC service line was a computer generated voice.
Just like the MacIntosh’s (Apple computers) that had voice software that could read any text on your computer TO YOU.
I had such software on my MAC 30 years ago. Funny, I hardly ever hear of anyone having such voice software on a PC, and when they do, the voice is really crappy and you can tell it isn’t a human.
Sometimes it seems like we are going backward, technologically.