Man draws against machine in quiz show

A JEOPARDY GAMESHOW champ has drawn with an IBM super computer in a man versus machine challenge.

Man almost reigned supreme over his metal overlords as a Jeopardy quiz show champ eked out a draw against a Big Blue's data analytics and natural language processing computer called Watson.

The challenge to beat the IBM super computer takes place on the show over the next three days so there's still a chance we'll have to bow down to our new metal masters.

Apparently, Watson is even more intelligent than Deep Blue, which beat Kasparov at chess in the nineties. The computer answered "Who is Jude?" to a question with lyrics from the Beatles song.  It also correctly answered questions on the Italian Renaissance and US swimmer Michael Phelps.

However, it obviously wasn't paying attention in its Latin class, getting the answer "terminal" wrong and repeating the same mistakes the other two human champs made. Reuters reported that it mixed up Beethoven and US actor Jamie Foxx in a training session before the show.

One of the Jeopardy contestants said he gets both mixed up and Watson displayed a lack of humour by not replying with a glib quip. Or Watson was simply working quantum levels of comedy a mere human game show contestant couldn't fathom and so didn't bother saying anything.

At the end of the first show Watson had banked $5000, the same amount as its human contestant Brad Rutter. The three-day contest has a prize of $1 million. If the human wins The INQUIRER wonders whether Watson might go the machine equivalent of postal, turning on his human captors by using his linguistic and analytical abilities for bad.

The event was set up in January when the INQUIRER reported that Watson whipped his human challengers in training sessions. µ