IBM's Watson Has A Date With Jeopardy

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If you, like a whole lot of people out there, think that Jeopardy is some boring game show your mom watches for no good reason, then you may want to hear about this: Jeopardy millionaires Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two guys who really know their trivia, will be in for the fight of their lives as they take on IBM’s Watson supercomputer in a three-day battle royale to find out just who knows the most about trivia.

Get your DVR fired up for this one, folks, because showtime is February 14th through the 16th (and on Valentine’s Day no less–nothing says “I Love You” in pure geek quite like a three-day grudge match between two trivia geniuses and a supercomputer), and you’ll get to watch firsthand as we find out whether man or machine can command more useless information at any one time.

We first talked about this one way back in the sunny depths of June, so it’s been a long while in coming, but the dates have finally been announced, and the Jeopardy version of the Deep Blue / Garry Kasparov chess match has finally been set.

And there’s even a prize attached: Jeopardy’s slapped a whopping million bucks down on this particular match, and charities all over America are terribly excited for the outcome: Jennings and Rutter have agreed to fork over half the cash should either of them win, whilst IBM has promised to fork over the lot to charity should Watson hand the meatbags their oversized hats.

Watson has actually taken on some Jeopardy contestants already, and while neither IBM nor Jeopardy wants to comment on Watson’s win-loss stats, the likelihood of Watson taking home the pot is pretty good indeed. And since charity gets a whole lot more money if the Watson wins, I’ll bet there are plenty of people out there pulling for the big iron to take the top price.