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IBM's Jeopardy-playing machine can now beat human contestants

IBM's Jeopardy-playing machine can now beat human contestants.

[How do humans know that they know the answer to a question faster than they able to answer the question? ]

The computer has an advantage when it comes to ringing in on questions. Anyone who's seen Jeopardy knows that human contestants can struggle with timing when buzzing in after questions. Watson has great reaction speed.

But the Watson development team faces many challenges in creating a robotic Jeopardy champion. Without being connected to the Internet, the computer has to understand natural language, determine the answer to a question (or, in the case of Jeopardy, the question to an answer), and then calculate the odds that its answer is correct in order to decide whether it is worth buzzing in.

The fear of getting a question wrong and losing money prevents many a wrong answer from a human Jeopardy contestant. At the same time, humans often instinctively know they know the answer to a question, even if it doesn't pop into their heads right away. So a human Jeopardy player will often click the buzzer upon hearing the question, and then spend the next several seconds pulling the answer out of the memory bank. To compete on Jeopardy, a computer must determine whether it knows the correct response within seconds.