IBM Watson won the 2011 television game show Jeopardy! against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.
Watson was an IBM question-answering computer system that combined natural-language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, and machine learning. It analyzed clues written in the show’s characteristic natural-language style and selected answers from a large body of information.
The televised competition took place over two games in February 2011. Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter, winning a first prize of $1 million. Jennings wrote a humorous acknowledgment of Watson’s victory on his Final Jeopardy! response.
Watson is often called a robot because it represented a major artificial-intelligence achievement, but it was not a mobile humanoid machine. The system ran on computer hardware and interacted with the show through a display and voice.