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A Victory For Computers as Watson Wins ‘Jeopardy’ By June Simms2011-2-27 Photo: AP Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter, right, look on as an IBM computer called Watson beats them to the buzzer to answer a question during a practice round. This is the VOA Special English Technology Report. An IBM super computer named Watson has won the latest battle of man versus machine. Watson won the first ever Jeopardy! quiz show competition starring a computer as a player. The show was broadcast on American television February sixteenth. The super computer defeated former Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter during the three-day competition. The two men had been the shows most successful players until then. The IBM computer proved to be more knowledgeable in every category, including the arts, popular culture and science. The human contestants spoke about their loss after the show. KEN JENNINGS/BRAD RUTTER: I think that we both got a taste of what it might have been like to play against us. Roger Norton is dean of the School of Computer Science and Mathematics at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. The school held a Watson watch party on the final day of the Jeopardy! competition. They compared it to a Super Bowl for the information technology industry. Roger Norton says everyone was amazed by Watsons performance. ROGER NORTON: It was very impressive in a number of ways. One is its ability to understand natural language. In Jeopardy! players are given information in the form of an answer. They must give an answer in the form of a question. Roger Norton says the very nature of the game makes Watsons performance even more extraordinary. ROGER NORTON: The ambiguity thats in those answers is very, very difficult for humans to understand, never mind a computer to understand. And then to be able to take that, try to understand it, then go off and search its vast amount of data that it has and do the appropriate analytics and come up with not on