On the days of February 15-17, Jeopardy! filmed from an IBM research facility in Yorktown Heights, NY to broadcast a highly contested match between legendary contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter as well as the IBM supercomputer Watson.  This match, which Watson won by an astounding margin, represents a major revolution in computer science.  Also, it was an entertaining and humorous game of Jeopardy! which will surely be remembered by future humans (and perhaps computers).

So what is Watson?  According to Clive Thompson of The New York Times, Watson is “able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer” (www.nytimes.com).  Watson’s interlocution is like any modern human, satisfying the decade old desire by people to see a robot that can communicate and conduct itself like a human.

Senior Evan Pye gushed at the fact that Watson can “think for its own.”  It uses information pre-loaded; none of its data is from the internet, which is stored into its 15 terabytes of rapid access memory (www.mendicott.com).

Watson represents much more than just the possibility of a computer winning a game show.  Computer programming instructor, USC computer czar, and head of the inferior Clairvoyant Todd Ollendyke said that “Watson represents a breakthrough in language processing.  Computer scientists will work on programs that ‘understand’ questions and be able to retrieve answers from large databases.  Imagine asking any question, no matter how convoluted and having a computer understand it and find the answer.   I hope it increases awareness in computer science in the general population.”

Watson had a ridiculously impressive showing.  Watson won $77,000, better than Ken Jennings’ $24,000 and Brad Rutter’s $21,600 (www.monstersandcritics.com).  Watson excellently guessed Bram Stoker for the final question in the competition: the second Final Jeopardy question about a book based off of an account of a journey to “Wallachia and Moldava”.  Watson, however, also had some glitches which caused him to sometimes come up with very erratic answer choices.

Junior John Howland Kulp articulated that “he had a lot of snide jokes going on.”  Junior Brian Rollick thought it was funny how, in Final Jeopardy, Watson answered “Toronto?????” in the category “US Cities”, though the android intelligently waged only a little more than $900 dollas.  Watson entertained audiences with his robot eccentricity and his strange responses, as well as his quiz bowl prowess which proved to be superior to that of the great Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.