This is how IBM is using computer models to create an inference engine that has problem-solving capabilities:

“What’s really going on under the hood is that Watson is taking input, generating hypotheses, and trying to prove them based on what it thinks it has understood about the clue, the category, even the surrounding clues. For each possible answer, Watson tries to find all the material that supports or refutes that answer. Then it analyzes that evidence to come up with a set of the best answers. That’s exactly what you do when you try to solve a problem, whether it’s differential diagnoses in medicine or a technical-support question or financial analysis; you look for the conditions in which a particular situation might occur. What the computer is helping you do is organize all that evidence for the possible answers — the possible diagnoses — from a huge amount of content.”

-David Ferrucci, Principal Investigator – Watson Project