At Brad’s and Ken’s gods-throwing-lightning level, the difference between winning and losing usually isn’t mental agility, but the ability to time the milliseconds between the moment Alex finishes the clue and one of the producers activates the buzzers, slamming your thumb down with either (a) near-perfect reflexes at the off-camera lights telling you the buzzers are go, or (b) a near-perfect guess at the off-stage producer’s timing.

Since a computer can obviously react to the “go” lights more rapidly and consistently than any human, it will probably win. My two cents, anyway.

The only alternative I can imagine is if Watson is given a human-like randomness in buzzing of a few milliseconds, but there’s no report I can find of any such delay. Apparently, if its algorithms generate a feeling of suave cockiness, dudebox can buzz in instantly.

Combined with Watson’s inhuman inability to forget anything or stress out, I don’t see how any mere primate has a prayer. (And that’s a measure of the amazing accomplishment of IBM’s engineers. Big applause to them. Still, the human ego has a fallback: as Ken has noted, Watson still couldn’t write a clever Jeopardy! clue to save its backside bus.)

– Jeopardy! champion Bob Harris, Boing Boing.

This is a good point, and good insight into how that works. Any Jeopardy! fan will tell you there’s a rule that you can’t buzz in until Alex Trebek is done talking, but I never was quite sure if there was some sort of prompt or what. Turns out it’s a light. That explains the delay before contestants buzz in for audio and video clues, too.

But I am not betting against Ken Jennings in a Jeopardy! match, whether against man or computer or beast or whatever. Remember that he is the O.G. Jeopardy-dominating machine, and as far as we know he is yet to glitch out.