Before he was the host of Jeopardy!, Ken Jennings set a record for most consecutive games won on the game show, lasting 74 games in 2004. Jennings also won the Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time tournament in 2020 against James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter, the latter of whom still holds the record for all-time Jeopardy! winnings with his nearly $5 million in prize money. But 15 years ago, both Jennings and Rutter were trounced on the game show by an IBM supercomputer called Watson.
Nowadays, artificial-intelligence technology can easily answer questions posed in everyday human speech, as Jeopardy! clues are. In 2010, however, it was a rare achievement for a computer to respond to a “natural language” question with a correct answer. “Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords,” The New York Times’ Clive Thompson wrote in a June 2010 article about IBM’s preparations for Watson’s moment in the Jeopardy! spotlight.
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