Trebek is hamming it up too much. Get to the questions already.

Yeah, a lot of fluff in today's installment.

Yuck, 2 games over three days. So there is going to be a lot of this.

Plus, no real playing along at home, as they will be displaying Watson's thought process...

Uff-da, looks like if it knows it, they likely won't buzz in before it.

We don't even get to Double Jeopardy today.

Yeah that was sort of lame. To make it fair they should have randomly handicapped Watson's response time, so it didn't essentially automatically ring in first every time it thought it knew the answer.

I don't mind that, they had it pushing an actual button mechanically, so it makes sense to do it that way.

Go Watson!

So Watson gets the question as a text message? That seems to stack the deck in favor of Watson due to his sheer processing speed.

Everyone gets it as text, so that's fair.

How quickly is Watson able to read, comprehend, and begin processing the answer compared to his human contestants? Seems the humans are getting frustrated with trying to buzz in before Watson.

Yeah, but that's sort of the point. You can't just buzz in right away anyway, you have to time it precisely when he's done reading.

The thing that gets me though, is they say it can't hear, so they must be giving it a cue as to when it can buzz in. If they are giving it a cue and they aren't giving it to the other guys, that's not very fair.

Love how Watson zeroed in on the Daily Double right off the bat. I was wondering if they programmed him to target the lower half of the board when Daily Doubles were available.

Exactly and that's the period Watson has to run the permutations.

The one where he repeated a wrong answer was totally bizarre, but I guess if he can't hear, that can happen.

I assume tomorrow will have a lot of filler too, but Wednesday should be the traditional format.

The clue for when to buzz in for human players is when a light goes on after Trebek finishes reading. I'm guessing that the light signal is also routed or otherwise alerted to Watson.

As for repeating the answers, that was weird...I thought they worked that out according to the Nova special (where he would be given access to other contestant's answers).

On regular Jeopardy a Production Assistant pushes a button when Alex is finished reading a question. The button does 2 things, it activates some lights letting the contestants know that they can answer now and it turns on the buzzers so they can buzz in. If you buzz in early you are locked out from buzzing for like 1 second or less. The computer is likely getting the same cue that the players are getting but most players don't wait for the light to come on to start pushing the button though.

Edit: Bluetoast beat me to it.

*Accidental double post*

That makes sense.

Has a deaf person ever competed on the show?

It seems like Rutter was able to get into a rhythm at the end which in trying to research the "buzz in" aspect for Watson looks to be an advantage for the humans since Watson always buzzes the same way.

OK, I wasn't sure about the light thing. That's fair then. Yes, Watson has an advantage there, but I wouldn't say it's unfair.

Yeah RD, I figured they'd be typing in the opponents answers or something, to avoid that situation. I'm interested to see it's betting strategy. I wonder if they gave him all of Rutter/Jenning's past Final Jeopardy's to learn from.

I don't know about a deaf person competing, but I know a blind person has in the past. Found this out since I was reading the Jeopardy forums yesterday after being led there by Google, and there was some interesting discussion leading up to the match.

Yeah - we discussed the blind champion in the thread last month on Watson. Somebody said he competed against Watson in some of the scrimmages.

So, do you think these were truly "random" type jeopardy questions, or do you think that they were to some specific "Watson" criteria?

I am not saying questions that Watson "knew" the answers to, but were within a vein that it would understand?