Ken Jennings on 'Jeopardy!': Can Man Beat Machine?

Feb. 14, 2011— -- The first time "Jeopardy!" champion Ken Jennings went on the popular game show, the ultimate prize was millions in cash. But when he faces off against IBM's super computer Watson this week, he's not just playing for money -- he's playing for all of mankind.

For the past four years, top artificial intelligence researchers at IBM have been preparing their mega-machine, Watson, to compete on "Jeopardy!" against all-time champions Jennings and Brad Rutter.

To win, the machine needs not just to know the facts, but to replicate a human's understanding of all the puns and wordplay woven into the game -- and then be the first to the buzzer.

This week, the much-hyped man vs. machine match-up airs on national television. And, Jennings said, the pressure is on.

"One of the first things I thought was, 'This time, I'm not just playing to pay my mortgage or something, or to feed my kid's college fund, I'm actually sort of representing 7 billion human beings against our new machine tyrants,'" he quipped. "That was a lot of responsibility. I didn't want to let people down."

When "Jeopardy!" first called him a couple of years ago to let him know that IBM was working on a supreme game-show machine, Jennings said he was "skeptical."

As a former computer programmer himself, he said, he knew the computer's limitations and doubted if IBM actually could pull it off.

But when he watched taped matches of Watson playing against top human contestants, he realized that beating the computer was hardly a foregone conclusion.

"Clearly, it was playing at a very high level. It sort of effortlessly handled the kinds of things I thought computers couldn't do," he said. "It could understand wordplay, it could understand things that were more conceptual than a single fact."

The three-day match, which airs tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday, was taped in January. Jennings can't reveal the winner, but said this: In speed, at least, Watson takes the top prize.

"Obviously, humans can't duplicate the precision of Watson's reflexes," he said. "If all three players are buzzing, it's going to be Watson because we just can't match its reflexes with our goopy neurons."