Day one of the three day Jeopardy tournament featuring IBM’s computer Watson and two legendary human Jeopardy champions is in the books. Watson began impressively and stands at $5000 with Brad Rutter, with Ken Jennings at $2000. Scores can change quickly with the higher values in the Double Jeopardy round, which airs today – 12:05 am local time on my ABC affiliate!

Jeopardy’s day one broadcast featured some nice exposition on Watson, with host Alex Trebek touring the off-site room where the guts of Watson actually sit, cooled by two large refrigeration units. The power of approximately 2800 modern desktops working together at once is connected via internet to Watson’s on-state avatar. Watson can’t search on-line for answers – all of its knowledge base is stored in a trillion-something somethings of onboard memory.

A link to the episode and Watson’s funny error after the jump…

You can watch the episode on YouTube. Click the link in the top right for part 2.

A neat feature was a graphic display of Watson’s top three answers and its level of certainty in each. The computer was deadly on song lyrics and definitions, though it missed the Latin for “end” and where trains can start – Watson answered “finis” instead of “terminal.”

Trebek observed that Watson can neither hear nor see. The questions appearing on the Jeopardy board are fed to Watson via text message when they are revealed to the players. The inability to hear and react to the other players resulted in an interesting error by Watson. Jennings incorrectly answered “1920s” trying to place an event in the correct decade. Watson then buzzed in and answered “The 1920s” – we could see from the graphic display that the computer had over 50% confidence in this answer (which was above its buz-in level), but it had no way to adapt to the information it could have learned from Jennings’s wrong answer. IBMers will surely be working to remedy this in the future.

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