Quote Originally Posted by Timman_24 View Post
I believe Watson was fed text files of the questions. I'm pretty sure the enormous amount of computer programmers that are coding these days are not doing it at a machine level. I bet there are only a handful of people that actually write code at that basic level, which is needed to progress the software front. I'd venture to guess 90% or more of programmers only know high level languages such as C and Java. There is no way to tackle unique hardware issues using those.
You might be disappointed there. Over the last ten years or so the web programming side of things has become such a huge industry that it's more likely the majority don't even know C or Java.

The numbers are abysmal if you're looking for people who've taken the time to really understand assembly well enough to read through a common disassembly or even those who are into some of the cooler more esoteric languages like haskell, ocaml, lisp, smalltalk.