SAN FRANCISCO - Fresh off its shellacking of two human champions of the Jeopardy! television show, a computer program developed by IBM Corp will soon get a workout in two hospitals that have signed up to test the technology.

The agreements with the Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine will be the program's first real-world tests outside of the trivia game show and IBM's laboratories.

Watson, as IBM has dubbed the program, represents a breakthrough in the ability of computers to understand human language and scour massive databases to supply the most likely answer to questions. It's not always right. Some of its errors in its Jeopardy! debut this week were amusingly off-base.

But it holds promise for doctors and hedge fund managers and other industries that need to sift through large amounts of data to answer questions.

Eliot Siegel, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said other artificial intelligence programs for hospitals have been slower and more limited in their responses than Watson promises to be.

They have also been largely limited by a physician's knowledge of a particular symptom or disease.

"In a busy medical practice, if you want help from the computer, you really don't have time to manually input all that information," he said.

Siegel says Watson could prove valuable one day in helping diagnose patients by scouring journals and other medical literature that physicians often don't have time to keep up with.

Yet the skills Watson showed in easily winning the three-day televised Jeopardy! tournament on Wednesday also suggests shortcomings that have long perplexed artificial intelligence researchers and which IBM's researchers will have to fix before the software can be used on patients.

"What you want is a system that understands you're not playing a quiz game in medicine and there's not one answer you're looking for," Siegel said.

Associated Press