Preview: Watson Creams Miles O'Brien

SCIENCE -- February 9, 2011 at 1:00 PM EDT

Preview: Watson Creams Miles O'Brien

Starting Monday, "Jeopardy!" viewers will witness a classic three-day man vs. machine match. In a John Henry, or better yet, Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov-style competition, the quiz show's two most successful players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, will compete against a supercomputer named Watson.

Miles O'Brien spoke to Hari Sreenivasan shortly after playing Watson:

A team of 25 IBM programmers spent four years building and testing Watson to play one of America's most challenging trivia shows. Creating a machine that could understand the culturally nuanced questions of "Jeopardy!" made the 1997 Deep Blue-Kasparov match seem like simple computation.

Once Watson was able to understand the clue, it had to decide on one appropriate response, rather than providing a list of possibilities like a search engine would generate. It wasn't until the team programmed Watson to learn in real time from its competitors that it really became a player.

For more on Watson and the IBM team behind it, watch NOVA's hour-long special, airing Wednesday night.

Watch a preview a special on Watson airing on NOVA Wednesday night:

Beginning October 24, 2012, PBS NewsHour will allow open commenting for all registered users. We hope that the elimination of our moderation process will enable a more organic discussion amongst you, our audience. However, if a commenter violates our terms of use or abuses the commenting forum, their comment will be removed. We reserve the right to remove posts that do not follow these basic guidelines: comments must be relevant to the topic of the post; may not include profanity, personal attacks or hate speech; may not promote a business or raise money; may not be spam. Anything you post should be your own work. The PBS NewsHour reserves the right to read on the air and/or publish on its website or in any medium now known or unknown the comments or emails that we receive. By submitting comments, you agree to the PBS Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, which include more details.