You may have seen IBM’s Watson challenge (and defeat!) two all-time human Jeopardy champions. Chris Bunch has won the Challenge shown below.  Chris answered all questions correctly.  I had in mind "X10" as the answer to number 8 because the Chinese symbol for ten is like a plus sign.  However, Chris's answer of "X++" is also clearly correct. Correct responses and the rationale are shown below.

Category: X10 innovation award winners around the world.

1. Answer: This innovation award winner has a gemstone translation project.

Question: Who is Koichi Sasada? (Working on Scripting on X10 - Ruby Script to X10 Program Translator).

2. Answer: The university of this Innovation Award winner has a banana slug as a mascot.

Question: Who is Cormac Flanagan at the University of California Santa Cruz.  Their mascot is a Banana Slug...("No Known Predators!")

3. Answer: This European Innovation Award winner is moving undergraduate courses to X10.

Question: Who is Claudia Fohry? (University of Kassel in Germany; project title is: Migrating Undergraduate Parallel Computing Courses to X10).

4. Answer: This Innovation Award winner is working on MapReduce.

Question: Who is Yu Wang? (Tsinghua University, China whose project is titled: MapReduce Framework on Heterogeneous Network). 

5. Answer: The work of this Innovation Award winner allows programmers to use Java frameworks.

Question: Who is Eli Tilevich? (He is at Virginia Tech and his project is titled: Automatic Adaptation of Java Frameworks to X10 to Improve Programmer Productivity).

6. Answer: These two Innovation Award winners are at a university which awarded a Ph.D. degree in mathematics (non-honarary) to an American football quarterback who played for the Cleveland Browns in the 1960’s.

Question: Who are Vivek Sarkar and Robert Cartwright? (They are at Rice University.  Frank Ryan received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rice and played a very successful quarterback for the Cleveland Browns.  The Innovation Award Project is titled: A First Programming Course in X10.)

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Category: Play with Numbers, Words and Symbols.

7.Answer: The cost in US dollars of an X10 license times e times pi times Avagadro’s Number.

Question: What is zero? The answer is zero because the cost of the license is zero.

8. Answer: This computer language could be expressed, in some way, as MULTIPLY concatenated with ADD.

Question: What is X10? As mentioned, the Chinese symbol for ten is very much like a plus sign.  Although clearly X++ is also a correct response.

9. Answer: This X10 construct can be found in a place to transform eggs to chicks, a portable firestarter, and the main source of calories in beef.

Question: What is AT?  (hATchery, mATch, fAT respectively.)

10. Answer: This X10 construct is intended to introduce a discipline to prevent deadlocks and race conditions.

Question: What is CLOCK?

11. Answer: In this hexadecimal year, an IBM computer beat world chess champion Kasparov.

Question: What is or when is 7CD?

12. Answer: This Innovation Award winner may make you think of an open German penny.

Question: Who is Frank Pfenning? (Professor Pfenning's project at CMU is titled: Embracing the Parallelism Forward Linear Logic Programming.  "Frank" means "open" and "Pfennig" in German is "penny" in English.