Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

– Ken Jennings.

A few big takeaways from the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge: First, the first two days of the show were kind of annoying. The computer’s cool and all, but show the circuits and move on. I tuned in to watch Jeopardy!, not an IBM commercial.

Second, clearly Watson’s big advantage was on the buzzer. At some point it became clear that Jennings and Brad Rutter were just trying to buzz in as quickly as they could and then think of the answer, just to beat Watson to the draw. That didn’t seem entirely fair; there were plenty of clues that Watson didn’t know or got wrong, but the computer got the opportunity to buzz in first on almost every answer on which it was confident. I wonder how it would have fared against Jennings and Rutter in a written trivia quiz, like bar trivia or something (and yeah, I realize it was designed to play Jeopardy!).

Third, Ken Jennings is awesome. He’s hilarious on Twitter, for one thing. Also, upon conceding to Watson in Final Jeopardy!, he referenced the Simpsons — “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” Awesome. Plus it turned out it was Jennings’ initial run of remarkable Jeopardy! success that inspired the Watson project in the first place; a bunch of IBM designers were eating in a restaurant trying to come up with something awesome to do when they noticed everyone in the restaurant empty into the bar to watch Jennings dominate some suckers. That begat Watson.

I’m disappointed and a little surprised that machine beat man in the IBM Challenge, but at least Jennings has a good sense of humor about it. Plus they say the computer’s going to help humanity in the long run, so that’s cool.

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.