Bah. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter? Where's the fun in that? I want to see Watson take on Sean Connery and Burt Reynolds.

Day 2's game just ended and Watson crushed them, getting about $30,000, though it completely screwed up the final jeopardy question and guessed "Toronto" when the topic was "U.S. Cities".

What I wonder is how they determine how quickly Watson is able to 'hit the buzzer', so to speak, and what decides whether Watson will even attempt to answer a particular question.

Contestants can't ring in until banks of lights on either side of the game board — invisible to the viewers at home — flash in their eyes. Host Alex Trebek finishes reading the question — or answer, if you want to be a dork about it — and the lights fire up.

...

And perhaps more alarmingly for the humans standing on either side of it, Watson will be hard-wired into the game board. When those banks of lights come to life, Watson will be triggered by an electrical impulse. Jennings's and Rutter's nervous systems will be racing against a higher voltage, and it's been a long time since anyone could turn off the lights and get into bed before the room got dark.

Being completely oblivious as to how computers actually are programmed to 'think', what exactly do said algorithms really tell the computer to do.

What is it calculating?

Actually, Lex, the similarities to Google are the most simple of its steps.

The real complexity comes from its ability to parse the questions typical of Jeopardy!, and glean the relevant relationships and keywords from the moray of double meanings, homonyms, and other wordplay classic to Jeopardy! in order to search against the right things. That's the real breakthrough, here.

Bah. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter? Where's the fun in that? I want to see Watson take on Sean Connery and Burt Reynolds.

Many users of Google type long strings into the search, which miraculously returns relevant links a lot of the time. These strings are often very complex. The two systems are fundamentally the same.