Jeopardy

Hey Blue... don't you live in Lancaster?

Your boy was on Jeopardy with the other brainiac against the IBM computer...

I think he came in 3rd, but that Kent Jennings guy beat the machine!

Yea, Brad and my son went to the same high school. Brad graduated a year after Noel. When Brad was in high school he was on the quiz bowl team (4 person team that competed against other schools to answer all sorts of questions against a clock). That team went onto win a few national competitions. Brad had marvelous training through that for Jeopardy and managed to win over 3 million. He's now trying his hand at acting in Los Angeles. I believe he donated half of his winnings to a local library organization. Good kid.

Watson had a huge advantage over the humans. Jeopardy is very much about the timing in hitting the buzzer and a machine can do that pretty quickly. Also, Watson was given the answer (remember, in Jeopardy, you're given an answer and must come up with a question) when it appeared on the screen. The human players have to read the text (or listen to Alex read it) before they can begin their thought process. By that time (probably, on average, a second or so) the computer has pretty much decided on its three choices and is preparing to hit the buzzer. Still, the IBM engineers did some incredible engineering there.