File this under "One Day The Machines Will Rise Against Us": Today, IBM's Watson supercomputer bested a pair of Jeopardy! champions in a practice round — of Jeopardy!, that is, not mortal combat (yet).

According to ZDNet, whose reps were at the practice round at IBM Research Worldwide Headquarters, the four-year-old computing system project beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter swiftly and without emotion, which you can see in the video embedded below (courtesy of ZDNet).

This demonstration is just a precursor to the first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition, which will air on February 14, 15 and 16.

Basically, this will be an event to rival IBM's Deep Blue computer beating World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1996.

Watson was named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and was built with the aim of producing a computing system that can answer questions in the same way a human can — picking up on all the cues of natural language.

"After four years, our scientific team believes that Watson is ready for this challenge based on its ability to rapidly comprehend what the Jeopardy! clue is asking, analyze the information it has access to, come up with precise answers, and develop an accurate confidence in its response,” says Dr. David Ferrucci, a scientist who leads the IBM Research team that built Watson.

Naturally, Watson was not created for the sole purpose of competing on game shows. According to a release, it could also be used in fields like healthcare, customer support, etc., as it has the ability to sort through tons of data and return answers ranked by its confidence in its conclusions.







Image courtesy of Flickr, REL Waldman

