Seattle's Ken Jennings to battle computer on Jeopardy!

Ken Jennings, Seattle's hometown Jeopardy! champion, will face his biggest challenge next week when he returns to the popular game show.

He'll be playing on behalf the entire human race.

The prerecorded episodes will pit Jennings against a new sort of competitor, one that has a screen instead of a face and a wire instead of a trigger thumb.

He and another all-time Jeopardy! winner took on an IBM supercomputer designed to analyze clues and give answers much like the human brain. Filming the shows gave Jennings a new perspective on the game he dominated for 74 straight episodes in 2006.

"I sort of felt like I'd been chosen to be a champion of the species or something," said Jennings.

He got the call that IBM was developing a supercomputer -- or super competitor, if you will -- two years ago.

"I thought it was the coolest thing that I had ever heard," Jennings said.

The computer, named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built to replicate a human's ability to answer questions with speed, accuracy and confidence. "Jeopardy!" producers think their show provides a significant challenge to the machine, because interpreting clues requires an understanding of irony, riddles and other forms of subtle context.

Jennings will face off against Watson during the Feb. 14-16 episodes of Jeopardy! He's joined by former champion Brad Rutter, who won millions on the show in 2000.

The grand prize is $1 million, with second place earning $300,000 and third place netting $200,000. Rutter and Jennings will donate half of their winnings to favorite charities, and IBM is donating all of Watson's winnings.

Jennings chose Seattle-based non-profit Village Reach to benefit from his profits.

Is playing against a computer different than what he's used to?

"It's very fast on the buzzer -- faster than any human could be," Jennings said. "You know, it's got wires instead of neurons."

But Watson doesn't tend to do well when word-play or humor is involved -- or on short questions that don't give it time to fully process information.

"It's still not as fast as we are, despite being the size of an RV," Jennings said.

He said the man-against-machine match-up is significant because it signals a shift in knowledge-based jobs, implying that outsourcing to machines might be the next wave of business.

"I sort of felt like a Detroit auto worker watching the robot replace him on the assembly line," he said.

Jennings said the machine is good at analytical problem solving, meaning it would also probably be a good contestant on shows such as "Deal Or No Deal.

Rutter added: "It's good at Jeopardy!, but let's see how it does at Top Chef."

For more on Watson, watch the video below.

Visit seattlepi.com's home page for more Seattle news.