Tennis-Wimbledon? It's elementary, dear Watson

London

DEEP in the bowels of the All England Club, an army of employees from one of the world's technology giants are teaching a computer named Watson to master tennis.

Seven-times Wimbledon champion Roger Federer can relax though. A silicon-chipped cyborg is not about to wreak havoc on his beloved Centre Court. Watson is a cognitive computer designed by IBM that played Gary Kasparov at chess and beat the most successful contestant on hit US game show Jeopardy in a US$1 million challenge.

Its latest task is crunching tennis statistics and digging through Wimbledon's vast historical archives to help feed the tournament's ever expanding digital output and answer the queries of the world's media churning out…