









It's official: The machines are smarter than mankind, at least when it comes to Jeopardy.

IBM supercomputer Watson has emerged victorious against its human competition in a three-day competition between the massively intelligent machine and two of Jeopardy's greatest champions: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Yesterday, the competition wasn't even close, with Watson earning $35,734 and his human competitors earning a combined $15,200. Today though, humanity — specifically Ken Jennings — gave Watson a run for its money. At one point during the third day of competition, Jennings (a 74-time champion) was up $15,000 to Watson's $11,673.

However, it wasn't even close in the end; Watson earned a total of $77,147. Jennings collected $24,000 in three days of competition, while Rutter garnered $21,600.

"I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” Jennings humorously wrote on his video screen, ceding the Jeopardy battle to his mechanical competitor.

For winning the three day competition, Watson will be awarded a $1 million prize. The intelligent machine won't be keeping its winnings, though; IBM will be donating the prize money to World Vision.

Watson's victory is the culmination of years of research and development for IBM. Watson calculates hundreds of algorithms simultaneously to parse human language complexities such as puns in order to find the answer through its massive database. The machine is powered by 90 32-core IBM Power 750 Express servers with a total of 16 terabytes of memory.