Nerds Bet Machine Can Beat Man on Jeopardy

Hal, meet Watson. IBM announced it will unleash a new supercomputer program, named after founder Thomas J. Watson, which they say could beat human competitors on Jeopardy, the New York Times reports. More advanced than the software that beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, Watson will weigh nearly infinite relationship ranges to make comparisons and interpretations.

"The big goal is to get computers to be able to converse in human terms," says the IBM team leader. "And we’re not there yet." The human contestant? IBM says they are considering Ken Jennings, who won Jeopardy 74 consecutive times and collected $2.52 million in 2004.
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