IBM Watson became the first computer system to win Jeopardy! against former champions in the 2011 televised competition.
Watson competed against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the show’s strongest human contestants. The three-day match was recorded in January 2011 and broadcast in February. Watson won the competition, earning a $1 million prize; Jennings finished second and Rutter third.
The system used natural-language processing, information retrieval, machine learning, and a large collection of reference material. It generated and ranked possible answers, estimated confidence, and selected whether to buzz. Jeopardy! was a demanding test because clues often contained wordplay, indirect references, and ambiguous language.
Watson was not the same system as Deep Blue, IBM’s chess computer. Watson’s Jeopardy! success also did not make it a general-purpose conversational assistant. IBM later applied Watson technologies to areas including healthcare, finance, and customer service.