Supercomputer Beats 'Jeopardy!' Champs

(FOXNews.com) - In the battle of man vs. machine, chalk one up for the robots.

After four years of development, IBM Thursday publicly unveiled a computer that specializes in analyzing natural human language, answering complex questions and playing "Jeopardy!"

To test its acumen, the machine was pitted in an exhibition match against the most celebrated human contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, to stunning effect. "Watson" quickly cleared out the entire first category without the humans getting even a buzz in.

Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the computer will compete in the first-ever man vs. machine "Jeopardy!" competition to air Feb. 14, 15, and 16.

It was not the first time IBM has used its technological know-how to pit people against computers but it was by far the most complex effort.

“When we deal with language, things are very different,” said David Ferrucci, principal investigator of Watson's DeepQA technology at IBM Research. “Language is ambiguous, it’s contextual, its implicit. Words are grounded really only in human cognition... It’s an incredibly difficult problem for computers.”

Watson is able to quickly analyze natural human language, scour its roughly 200 million pages of stored content -- about 1 million books worth -- and find an answer with confidence in as little as 3 seconds.

At one point, upon answering a question in the category “Chicks Dig Me,” Watson even made a joke, saying "Let's finish 'Chicks Dig Me'" -- causing the audience to erupt in laughter and applause.

Watson ended the exhibition in the lead with $4,400, co-mpared to Jennings' $3,400 and Rutter's $1,200.

Lucky for the human race, a continuation of that battle shown on internal televisions during lunch revealed that Jennings pulled ahead by scoring a Daily Double.

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