Given how easily earlier messages were cracked, there was significant reason to believe that Zodiac did not actually encrypt his message properly. He was a delusional psychopath, and even the current effort, if you look at the details, had to deal with misspellings and out of order values that may not have even been deliberate. The team admits that it got very lucky.

Watson is marketing bullshit. IBM sells services as Watson-enabled and then mostly has typical consultants do basic things like set up regressions.

Actual tests of Watson, like in medicine, have been a huge failure. It's nowhere close to being generally intelligent.