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IBM Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language . It was developed as a part of IBM 's DeepQA project by a research team, led by principal investigator David Ferrucci . Watson was named after IBM's founder and first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson .

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142-593: The computer system was initially developed to answer questions on the popular quiz show Jeopardy! and in 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! against champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings , winning the first-place prize of US$ 1 million. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center , New York City, in conjunction with WellPoint (now Elevance Health ). Watson

284-403: A Jeopardy! Masters spinoff, indicating a change of arrangement. In May 2023, Bialik opted not to host the final episodes of the season in support of writers during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike , with Jennings stepping in to host the remaining episodes. Bialik formally went on strike with her union, SAG-AFTRA , shortly thereafter. It was later announced that Jennings would host

426-464: A light pen on an electronic display on their lectern within a time limit of five minutes, during which they also phrase the question, which is pre-written during the wager. After the break, the Final Jeopardy! clue is revealed and read by the host. The contestants have 30 seconds to write their responses on the electronic display, while the show's "Think!" music plays. If either the display or

568-476: A lock-out device . The first contestant to successfully ring in is prompted to respond to the clue by stating a question containing the correct answer to the clue. Any grammatically coherent question with the correct answer within it counts as a correct response. If the contestant responds correctly, its dollar value is added to the contestant's score, and they may select a new clue from the board. An incorrect response or failure to respond within five seconds deducts

710-446: A 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight-core processor, with four threads per core. In total, the system uses 2,880 POWER7 processor threads and 16 terabytes of RAM. According to John Rennie , Watson can process 500 gigabytes (the equivalent of a million books) per second. IBM master inventor and senior consultant Tony Pearson estimated Watson's hardware cost at about three million dollars. Its Linpack performance stands at 80 TeraFLOPs , which

852-561: A Daily Double clue, while Watson responded to one Daily Double clue incorrectly for the first time in the Double Jeopardy! Round. After the first round, Watson placed second for the first time in the competition after Rutter and Jennings were briefly successful in increasing their dollar values before Watson could respond. Nonetheless, the final result ended with a victory for Watson with a score of $ 77,147, besting Jennings who scored $ 24,000 and Rutter who scored $ 21,600. The prizes for

994-399: A commercial break follows. Contestants who finish Double Jeopardy! with less than $ 1 do not participate in this round. During the break, partitions are placed between the contestant lecterns, and each contestant makes a final wager; they may wager any amount of their earnings, but may not wager certain numbers with connotations that are deemed inappropriate. Contestants write their wagers using

1136-521: A company for developing a natural language interface for database queries on personal computers. However, with the advent of mouse-driven graphical user interfaces , Symantec changed direction. A number of other commercial efforts were started around the same time, e.g. , Larry R. Harris at the Artificial Intelligence Corporation and Roger Schank and his students at Cognitive Systems Corp. In 1983, Michael Dyer developed

1278-480: A correct question to win the game. If neither player gives the correct question, another clue is given. Previously, if two or all three contestants tied for first place, they were declared "co-champions", and each retained his or her winnings and (unless one was a five-time champion who retired prior to 2003) returned on the following episode. A tie occurred on the January 29, 2014, episode when Arthur Chu , leading at

1420-441: A correct response is revealed the host confirms it. Otherwise, the host reveals the correct response if all contestants responded incorrectly. A correct response adds the amount of the contestant's wager to their score. A miss, failure to respond, insufficiently specific response, misspelling that affects the pronunciation of the answer, or failure to phrase the response as a question (even if correct) deducts it. The contestant with

1562-552: A dialogue in English on any topic, the most popular being psychotherapy. ELIZA worked by simple parsing and substitution of key words into canned phrases and Weizenbaum sidestepped the problem of giving the program a database of real-world knowledge or a rich lexicon . Yet ELIZA gained surprising popularity as a toy project and can be seen as a very early precursor to current commercial systems such as those used by Ask.com . In 1969, Roger Schank at Stanford University introduced

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1704-424: A dollar greater than twice the second place contestant's score, guaranteeing a win with a correct response. Writing about Jeopardy! wagering in the 1990s, mathematicians George Gilbert and Rhonda Hatcher said that "most players wager aggressively". The top scorer in each game is paid their winnings in cash and returns to play in the next match. Non-winners receive consolation prizes instead of their winnings in

1846-476: A few seconds of silence where the lights on the Jeopardy! set (which had been set up for Jennings to host before Trebek's death) slowly dimmed. That episode, as well as subsequent episodes that aired after Trebek's death, included a dedication screen at the end of the credits through the remainder of the season. To compensate for concerns over pre-emptions caused by holiday week specials and sports, SPT postponed

1988-474: A few seconds, and at that time, the problems posed by the game show were deemed to be impossible to solve. In initial tests run during 2006 by David Ferrucci, the senior manager of IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration department, Watson was given 500 clues from past Jeopardy! programs. While the best real-life competitors buzzed in half the time and responded correctly to as many as 95% of clues, Watson's first pass could get only about 15% correct. During 2007,

2130-458: A job offer – may be allowed to appear as a co-champion (now a rare occurrence since the co-champion rule was disestablished in early Season 31) in a later episode. Throughout each season, Jeopardy! features various special tournaments for particular groups (as named in " Tournaments and other events " below). Each year at the Tournament of Champions, the players who had won

2272-418: A joke from The Simpsons . Jennings later wrote an article for Slate , in which he stated: IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis , business analytics , and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in

2414-619: A leg?"). Because Watson, unlike a human, could not have been responding to Jennings's mistake, it was decided that this response was incorrect. The broadcast version of the episode was edited to omit Trebek's original acceptance of Watson's response. Watson also demonstrated complex wagering strategies on the Daily Doubles, with one bet at $ 6,435 and another at $ 1,246. Gerald Tesauro, one of the IBM researchers who worked on Watson, explained that Watson's wagers were based on its confidence level for

2556-539: A logical fit for what IBM calls the Watson Ecosystem. Thus far, roughly 800 organizations and individuals have signed up with IBM, with interest in creating applications that could use the Watson platform. On January 30, 2013, it was announced that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute would receive a successor version of Watson, which would be housed at the institute's technology park and be available to researchers and students. By summer 2013, Rensselaer had become

2698-495: A marketer and the audience it is targeting. In February 2017, Rare Carat, a New York City-based startup and e-commerce platform for buying diamonds and diamond rings, introduced an IBM Watson-powered chatbot called "Rocky" to assist novice diamond buyers through the daunting process of purchasing a diamond. As part of the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program, Rare Carat received the assistance of IBM in

2840-446: A meaningful conversation with machines is only possible when we match every word to the correct meaning based on the meanings of the other words in the sentence – just like a 3-year-old does without guesswork." The umbrella term "natural language understanding" can be applied to a diverse set of computer applications, ranging from small, relatively simple tasks such as short commands issued to robots , to highly complex endeavors such as

2982-477: A much more complex challenge than the wordless game of chess, eventually David Ferrucci took him up on the offer. In competitions managed by the United States government, Watson's predecessor, a system named Piquant, was usually able to respond correctly to only about 35% of clues and often required several minutes to respond. To compete successfully on Jeopardy! , Watson would need to respond in no more than

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3124-399: A number of years. In 1971, Terry Winograd finished writing SHRDLU for his PhD thesis at MIT. SHRDLU could understand simple English sentences in a restricted world of children's blocks to direct a robotic arm to move items. The successful demonstration of SHRDLU provided significant momentum for continued research in the field. Winograd continued to be a major influence in the field with

3266-411: A positive score, no contestant automatically qualifies from that game, and an additional wild card contestant advances instead. This occurred in the quarterfinals of the 1991 Seniors Tournament and the semifinals of the 2013 Teen Tournament, where the rule was in effect during the semifinals, but after that tournament the rule has changed for semifinals and finals. As the players are not isolated during

3408-549: A presenting sponsor has provided cash prizes to the losing contestants. The winner of each episode returns to compete against two new contestants on the next episode. Originally, a contestant who won five consecutive days retired undefeated and was guaranteed a spot in the Tournament of Champions. The five-day limit was eliminated September 8, 2003. In rare instances, contestants tie for first place. The rules related to ties have changed over time. Since November 24, 2014, ties for first place following Final Jeopardy! are broken with

3550-462: A regular basis. During the game, Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of the 2011 edition of Misplaced Pages, but was not connected to the Internet. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on

3692-411: A result, no Final Jeopardy! round was played. This rule is still in place for the syndicated version, although staff has suggested that it is not set in stone and they may decide to display the clue for home viewers' play if such a situation were ever to occur. The Final Jeopardy! round features a single clue. At the end of the Double Jeopardy! round, the host announces the Final Jeopardy! category and

3834-450: A robotic "finger" pressing the buzzer, Watson remained faster than its human competitors. Ken Jennings noted, "If you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all", and that Watson "can knock out a microsecond-precise buzz every single time with little or no variation. Human reflexes can't compete with computer circuits in this regard." Stephen Baker , a journalist who recorded Watson's development in his book Final Jeopardy , reported that

3976-443: A small range of applications. Narrow but deep systems explore and model mechanisms of understanding, but they still have limited application. Systems that attempt to understand the contents of a document such as a news release beyond simple keyword matching and to judge its suitability for a user are broader and require significant complexity, but they are still somewhat shallow. Systems that are both very broad and very deep are beyond

4118-476: A sound accompanied a contestant ringing in. According to Trebek, the sound was eliminated because it was "distracting to the viewers" and presented a problem when contestants rang in while Trebek was still reading the clue. Contestants who are visually impaired or blind are given a card with the category names printed in Braille before each round begins. To ensure fairness in competition and accuracy in scores,

4260-416: A switch, and give the answers to the contestant and let them come up with the question? She fired a couple of answers to me: "5,280"—and the question of course was "How many feet in a mile?" Another was "79 Wistful Vista"; that was Fibber and Mollie McGee's address. I loved the idea, went straight to NBC with the idea, and they bought it without even looking at a pilot show. Griffin's first conception of

4402-428: A system determine both the complexity of the system (and the implied challenges) and the types of applications it can deal with. The "breadth" of a system is measured by the sizes of its vocabulary and grammar. The "depth" is measured by the degree to which its understanding approximates that of a fluent native speaker. At the narrowest and shallowest, English-like command interpreters require minimal complexity, but have

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4544-417: A tie-breaker clue, resulting in only one champion being named, keeping their winnings, and returning to compete in the next show. The tied contestants are given the single clue, and the first contestant to buzz-in must give the correct question. A contestant cannot win by default if the opponent gives an incorrect question or forgets to phrase the response as a question (even if correct). The contestant must give

4686-476: A wager, from a minimum of $ 5 to a maximum of their entire score (known as a "true Daily Double") or the highest clue value available in the round, whichever is greater. Only the contestant who chooses the Daily Double is allowed to answer. A correct response adds the value of the wager to the contestant's score while an incorrect response or failure to provide a response deducts the same value. Whether or not

4828-833: A way to quickly respond to questions from guests. Arria NLG has built an app that helps energy companies stay within regulatory guidelines, making it easier for managers to make sense of thousands of pages of legal and technical jargon. OmniEarth, Inc. uses Watson computer vision services to analyze satellite and aerial imagery, along with other municipal data, to infer water usage on a property-by-property basis, helping districts in California improve water conservation efforts. In September 2016, Condé Nast started using Watson to help build and strategize social influencer campaigns for brands. Using software built by IBM and Influential, Condé Nast's clients will be able to know which influencer's demographics, personality traits and more best align with

4970-430: A worldwide following with regional adaptations in many other countries. Each game of Jeopardy! features three contestants competing in three rounds: Jeopardy!, Double Jeopardy!, and Final Jeopardy! In each round, contestants are presented trivia clues phrased as answers, to which they must respond in the form of a question that correctly identifies whatever the clue is describing. For example, instead of asking, "Who

5112-528: Is a subset of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension . NLU has been considered an AI-hard problem. There is considerable commercial interest in the field because of its application to automated reasoning , machine translation , question answering , news-gathering, text categorization , voice-activation , archiving, and large-scale content analysis . The program STUDENT , written in 1964 by Daniel Bobrow for his PhD dissertation at MIT ,

5254-910: Is about half as fast as the cut-off line for the Top 500 Supercomputers list. According to Rennie, all content was stored in Watson's RAM for the Jeopardy game because data stored on hard drives would be too slow to compete with human Jeopardy champions. The sources of information for Watson include encyclopedias, dictionaries , thesauri , newswire articles and literary works . Watson also used databases, taxonomies and ontologies including DBPedia , WordNet and Yago . The IBM team provided Watson with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference material, that it could use to build its knowledge. Watson parses questions into different keywords and sentence fragments in order to find statistically related phrases. Watson's main innovation

5396-483: Is based on commercially available IBM Power 750 servers that have been marketed since February 2010. Commentator Rick Merritt said that "there's another really important reason why it is strategic for IBM to be seen very broadly by the American public as a company that can tackle tough computer problems. A big slice of [IBM's profit] comes from selling to the U.S. government some of the biggest, most expensive systems in

5538-475: Is capable only of manipulating symbols, but has no ability to understand the meaning of those symbols; however, Searle's experiment has its detractors . On February 28, 2011, Watson played an untelevised exhibition match of Jeopardy! against members of the United States House of Representatives . In the first round, Rush D. Holt, Jr. (D-NJ, a former Jeopardy! contestant), who was challenging

5680-642: Is generally achieved by mapping the derived meaning into a set of assertions in predicate logic , then using logical deduction to arrive at conclusions. Therefore, systems based on functional languages such as Lisp need to include a subsystem to represent logical assertions, while logic-oriented systems such as those using the language Prolog generally rely on an extension of the built-in logical representation framework. The management of context in NLU can present special challenges. A large variety of examples and counter examples have resulted in multiple approaches to

5822-442: Is one of the earliest known attempts at NLU by a computer. Eight years after John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence , Bobrow's dissertation (titled Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem Solving System ) showed how a computer could understand simple natural language input to solve algebra word problems. A year later, in 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT wrote ELIZA , an interactive program that carried on

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5964-465: Is one of the longest-running game shows of all time. The show has consistently enjoyed a wide viewership and received many accolades from professional television critics. With over 9,000 episodes aired, the daily syndicated version of Jeopardy! has won a record 45 Emmy Awards as well as a Peabody Award . In 2013, the program was ranked No. 45 on TV Guide ' s list of the 60 greatest shows in American television history. Jeopardy! has also gained

6106-475: Is phrased properly in question form. A contestant who initially does not phrase a response in the form of a question must re-phrase it before the host rules against them. Contestants are encouraged to select the clues in order from lowest to highest value, as the clues are sometimes written in each category to flow from one to the next. Deviating from this is known as the "Forrest Bounce", a strategy in which contestants randomly pick clues to confuse opponents that

6248-526: Is the only U.S. President to marry in the White House?" and the answer being " Grover Cleveland ", the clue is "He is the only U.S. president to marry in the White House" and the contestant would respond by asking "Who is Grover Cleveland?" The Jeopardy! and Double Jeopardy! rounds each feature game boards consisting of six categories with five clues each. The clues are valued by dollar amounts from lowest to highest, ostensibly by difficulty. The values of

6390-476: Is to have computers start to interact in natural human terms across a range of applications and processes, understanding the questions that humans ask and providing answers that humans can understand and justify." It has been suggested by Robert C. Weber, IBM's general counsel , that Watson may be used for legal research. The company also intends to use Watson in other information-intensive fields, such as telecommunications, financial services, and government. Watson

6532-501: Is to parse keywords in a clue while searching for related terms as responses. This gives Watson some advantages and disadvantages compared with human Jeopardy! players. Watson has deficiencies in understanding the context of the clues. Watson can read, analyze, and learn from natural language, which gives it the ability to make human-like decisions. As a result, human players usually generate responses faster than Watson, especially to short clues. Watson's programming prevents it from using

6674-476: Is unable to attend a taping. In such cases, her voice is replaced with Gilbert's in post-production. The Clue Crew traveled to over 300 cities worldwide, spanning all 50 of the United States and 46 other countries. Occasionally, they visited schools to showcase the educational game Classroom Jeopardy! Robert Rubin served as the producer of the original Jeopardy! series for most of its run and later became its executive producer. Following Rubin's promotion,

6816-474: The Patom Theory , supports this assessment. Natural language processing has made inroads for applications to support human productivity in service and e-commerce, but this has largely been made possible by narrowing the scope of the application. There are thousands of ways to request something in a human language that still defies conventional natural language processing. According to Wibe Wagemans, "To have

6958-556: The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system using the Apache Hadoop framework to provide distributed computing. The system is workload-optimized, integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and built on IBM's DeepQA technology, which it uses to generate hypotheses, gather massive evidence, and analyze data. Watson employs a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which uses

7100-598: The University of Texas at Austin , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and the University of Trento , as well as students from New York Medical College . Among the team of IBM programmers who worked on Watson was 2001 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? top prize winner Ed Toutant, who himself had appeared on Jeopardy! in 1989 (winning one game). In 2008, IBM representatives communicated with Jeopardy! executive producer Harry Friedman about

7242-566: The conceptual dependency theory for NLU. This model, partially influenced by the work of Sydney Lamb , was extensively used by Schank's students at Yale University , such as Robert Wilensky , Wendy Lehnert , and Janet Kolodner . In 1970, William A. Woods introduced the augmented transition network (ATN) to represent natural language input. Instead of phrase structure rules ATNs used an equivalent set of finite state automata that were called recursively. ATNs and their more general format called "generalized ATNs" continued to be used for

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7384-407: The dBase system whose easy-to-use syntax effectively launched the personal computer database industry. Systems with an easy to use or English-like syntax are, however, quite distinct from systems that use a rich lexicon and include an internal representation (often as first order logic ) of the semantics of natural language sentences. Hence the breadth and depth of "understanding" aimed at by

7526-595: The number 42 in Douglas Adams ' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . Joshua Davis , the artist who designed the avatar for the project, explained to Stephen Baker that there are 36 trigger-able states that Watson was able to use throughout the game to show its confidence in responding to a clue correctly; he had hoped to be able to find forty-two, to add another level to the Hitchhiker's Guide reference, but he

7668-445: The '20s?" in reference to the 1920s. Then Watson said "What is 1920s?") Because Watson could not recognize other contestants' responses, it did not know that Jennings had already given the same response. In another instance, Watson was initially given credit for a response of "What is a leg?" after Jennings incorrectly responded "What is: he only had one hand?" to a clue about George Eyser (the correct response was, "What is: he's missing

7810-482: The 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of 'thinking' machines. 'Quiz show contestant' may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last. Philosopher John Searle argues that Watson—despite impressive capabilities—cannot actually think. Drawing on his Chinese room thought experiment , Searle claims that Watson, like other computational machines,

7952-545: The BORIS system at Yale which bore similarities to the work of Roger Schank and W. G. Lehnert. The third millennium saw the introduction of systems using machine learning for text classification, such as the IBM Watson . However, experts debate how much "understanding" such systems demonstrate: e.g. , according to John Searle , Watson did not even understand the questions. John Ball , cognitive scientist and inventor of

8094-649: The Clue Crew in 2004, and Jon Cannon and Kelly Miyahara took over her position in 2005. Farrell recorded clues until October 2008, and Cannon until July 2009. Miyahara, who also served as announcer for the Sports Jeopardy! spin-off series, left in 2019. The Clue Crew was eliminated beginning with the 39th season in September 2022; Foss became a producer for the show and McGuire a stage manager . Foss also serves as in-studio announcer when Johnny Gilbert

8236-585: The Experience Voices of Another Time was opened at the National Museum of Anthropology using IBM Watson as an alternative to visiting a museum. Jeopardy! Jeopardy! is an American television game show created by Merv Griffin . The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given general knowledge clues in

8378-481: The IBM team was given three to five years and a staff of 15 people to solve the problems. John E. Kelly III succeeded Paul Horn as head of IBM Research in 2007. InformationWeek described Kelly as "the father of Watson" and credited him for encouraging the system to compete against humans on Jeopardy! . By 2008, the developers had advanced Watson such that it could compete with Jeopardy! champions. By February 2010, Watson could beat human Jeopardy! contestants on

8520-412: The Tournament of Champions, the quarterfinals are unseeded and contestants participate in a random draw to determine playing order and lectern positions over the course of the five games. The Tournament of Champions is seeded based on total winnings in regular games to determine playing order and lectern positions, with the top five players occupying the champion's lectern for the quarterfinal games. Since

8662-474: The aforementioned Richards; news personalities Katie Couric , Bill Whitaker , Savannah Guthrie , Sanjay Gupta , Anderson Cooper , George Stephanopoulos , and Robin Roberts ; athlete Aaron Rodgers ; talk show host Mehmet Oz ; actress Mayim Bialik ; former children's show host LeVar Burton ; business journalist David Faber ; and sportscaster Joe Buck . In addition, the 2021 Tournament of Champions

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8804-490: The air dates of Trebek's final week; the episodes scheduled for the week of December 21–25 were moved to January 4–8, 2021. Before Trebek's final episodes, reruns of episodes in which he recorded clues on location were shown from December 21, 2020, to January 1, 2021. Jennings took over hosting when production resumed on November 30, 2020; his six weeks of episodes aired between January 11 and February 19, 2021. The season went on to be completed by additional guest hosts, namely

8946-413: The bottom of the board. This strategy was regularly used by James Holzhauer during his winning streak between April and June 2019. From the premiere of the original Jeopardy! until the end of the 1984–85 syndicated season, contestants were allowed to ring in as soon as the clue was revealed. Since September 1985, contestants are required to wait until the clue is read before ringing in. To accommodate

9088-433: The categories and clues. Billy Wisse is the editorial producer and Michele Loud is the editorial supervisor. Previous writing and editorial supervisors have included Jules Minton, Terrence McDonnell, Harry Eisenberg, and Gary Johnson. Trebek himself also contributed to writing clues and categories. Natural language understanding Natural language understanding ( NLU ) or natural language interpretation ( NLI )

9230-474: The category and a complex regression model called the Game State Evaluator. Watson took a commanding lead in Double Jeopardy!, correctly responding to both Daily Doubles. Watson responded to the second Daily Double correctly with a 32% confidence score. However, during the Final Jeopardy! round, Watson was the only contestant to miss the clue in the category U.S. Cities ("Its largest airport

9372-539: The changes. If an error that may have affected the result is not discovered until after taping of an episode is completed, the affected contestants are invited back to compete on a future show complying with federal quiz show regulations. Contestants who finish Double Jeopardy! with zero dollars or a negative score are automatically eliminated from the game at that point and awarded a consolation prize. On at least one episode hosted by Art Fleming, all three contestants finished Double Jeopardy! with zero dollars or less, and as

9514-404: The clue and decide whether to signal for responding. During that time, Watson also has to evaluate the response and determine whether it is sufficiently confident in the result to signal. Part of the system used to win the Jeopardy! contest was the electronic circuitry that receives the "ready" signal and then examines whether Watson's confidence level was great enough to activate the buzzer. Given

9656-401: The clue's value from the contestant's score and allows the other contestants the opportunity to ring in and respond. If the response is not technically incorrect but otherwise judged too vague, the contestant is given additional time to provide a more specific response. Whenever none of the contestants ring in and respond correctly, the host gives the correct response, and the player who selected

9798-588: The clues increased over time, with those in the Double Jeopardy! round always being double the range of the Jeopardy! round. On the original Jeopardy! series, clue values in the first round ranged from $ 10 to $ 50 in the Jeopardy! round and $ 20 to $ 100 in Double Jeopardy! On The All-New Jeopardy! , they ranged from $ 25 to $ 125 and $ 50 to $ 250. The 1984 series' clue values originally ranged from $ 100 to $ 500 in Jeopardy! and $ 200 to $ 1,000 in Double Jeopardy! These ranges were increased to $ 200–$ 1,000 and $ 400–$ 2,000, respectively, on November 26, 2001. Gameplay begins when

9940-406: The clues, thereby turning the game into a Turing test . To alleviate that claim, a third party randomly picked the clues from previously written shows that were never broadcast. Jeopardy! staff also showed concerns over Watson's reaction time on the buzzer. Originally Watson signaled electronically, but show staff requested that it press a button physically, as the human contestants would. Even with

10082-566: The competition were $ 1 million for first place (Watson), $ 300,000 for second place (Jennings), and $ 200,000 for third place (Rutter). As promised, IBM donated 100% of Watson's winnings to charity, with 50% of those winnings going to World Vision and 50% going to World Community Grid . Similarly, Jennings and Rutter donated 50% of their winnings to their respective charities. In acknowledgement of IBM and Watson's achievements, Jennings made an additional remark in his Final Jeopardy! response: "I for one welcome our new computer overlords", paraphrasing

10224-604: The comprehension. The interpretation capabilities of a language-understanding system depend on the semantic theory it uses. Competing semantic theories of language have specific trade-offs in their suitability as the basis of computer-automated semantic interpretation. These range from naive semantics or stochastic semantic analysis to the use of pragmatics to derive meaning from context. Semantic parsers convert natural-language texts into formal meaning representations. Advanced applications of NLU also attempt to incorporate logical inference within their framework. This

10366-563: The computer with Bill Cassidy (R-LA, later Senator from Louisiana), led with Watson in second place. However, combining the scores between all matches, the final score was $ 40,300 for Watson and $ 30,000 for the congressional players combined. IBM's Christopher Padilla said of the match, "The technology behind Watson represents a major advancement in computing. In the data-intensive environment of government, this type of technology can help organizations make better decisions and improve how government helps its citizens." According to IBM, "The goal

10508-528: The conflict between IBM and Jeopardy! became so serious in May 2010 that the competition was almost cancelled. As part of the preparation, IBM constructed a mock set in a conference room at one of its technology sites to model the one used on Jeopardy! . Human players, including former Jeopardy! contestants, also participated in mock games against Watson with Todd Alan Crain of The Onion playing host. About 100 test matches were conducted with Watson winning 65% of

10650-437: The contestant in third receives the third-place prize. Various researchers have studied Final Jeopardy! wagering strategies. If the leader's score is more than twice the second place contestant's score (a situation known as a "runaway game"), the leader can guarantee victory by making a sufficiently small wager. Otherwise, according to Jeopardy! College Champion Keith Williams, the leader usually wagers an amount that would be

10792-447: The contestant responds correctly, they choose the next clue. During the Jeopardy! round, contestants are not penalized for forgetting to phrase their response in the form of a question, although the host will remind them to watch their phrasing in future responses. In the Double Jeopardy! round and in the Daily Double in the Jeopardy! round, the phrasing rule is followed more strictly, with a response only able to be ruled as correct if it

10934-573: The cost of travel if a tournament travels (does not stay in Los Angeles) on the second week. Starting in Season 40, according to the official podcast in August 2023, as a result of inflation, consolation prizes were raised $ 1,000 each to $ 3,000 for second and $ 2,000 for third. During Art Fleming's hosting run, all three contestants received their winnings in cash where applicable. This was changed at

11076-516: The current state of the art. Regardless of the approach used, most NLU systems share some common components. The system needs a lexicon of the language and a parser and grammar rules to break sentences into an internal representation. The construction of a rich lexicon with a suitable ontology requires significant effort, e.g. , the Wordnet lexicon required many person-years of effort. The system also needs theory from semantics to guide

11218-409: The daily syndicated version's first pilot, from 1983, Jay Stewart served as the announcer, but Johnny Gilbert took over the role at Trebek's recommendation when that version was picked up as a series. The Jeopardy! Clue Crew, introduced on September 24, 2001, was a team of roving correspondents who appeared in videos, recorded around the world, to narrate some clues. Explaining why the Clue Crew

11360-667: The development of the Rocky Chat Bot. In May 2017, IBM partnered with the Pebble Beach Company to use Watson as a concierge . Watson technology was added to an app developed by Pebble Beach and was used to guide visitors around the resort. The mobile app was designed by IBM iX and hosted on the IBM Cloud. It uses Watson's Conversation applications programming interface. In November 2017, in Mexico City,

11502-416: The end of Double Jeopardy!, wagered to tie challenger Carolyn Collins rather than winning. Chu followed Jeopardy! College Champion Keith Williams's advice to wager for the tie to increase the leader's chances of winning. A three-way (non-zero) tie for first place has only occurred once on the syndicated version hosted by Trebek, on March 16, 2007, when Scott Weiss, Jamey Kirby, and Anders Martinson all ended

11644-442: The entire restaurant had piled toward the televisions, mid-meal, to watch Jeopardy! . Intrigued by the quiz show as a possible challenge for IBM, Lickel passed the idea on, and in 2005, IBM Research executive Paul Horn supported Lickel, pushing for someone in his department to take up the challenge of playing Jeopardy! with an IBM system. Though he initially had trouble finding any research staff willing to take on what looked to be

11786-412: The final $ 1,000 question. None of the three players responded incorrectly to a clue. The first round was broadcast February 14, 2011, and the second round, on February 15, 2011. The right to choose the first category had been determined by a draw won by Rutter. Watson, represented by a computer monitor display and artificial voice, responded correctly to the second clue and then selected the fourth clue of

11928-418: The first category, a deliberate strategy to find the Daily Double as quickly as possible. Watson's guess at the Daily Double location was correct. At the end of the first round, Watson was tied with Rutter at $ 5,000; Jennings had $ 2,000. Watson's performance was characterized by some quirks. In one instance, Watson repeated a reworded version of an incorrect response offered by Jennings. (Jennings said "What are

12070-1073: The first university to receive a Watson computer. On February 6, 2014, it was reported that IBM plans to invest $ 100 million in a 10-year initiative to use Watson and other IBM technologies to help countries in Africa address development problems, beginning with healthcare and education. On June 3, 2014, three new Watson Ecosystem partners were chosen from more than 400 business concepts submitted by teams spanning 18 industries from 43 countries. "These bright and enterprising organizations have discovered innovative ways to apply Watson that can deliver demonstrable business benefits", said Steve Gold, vice president, IBM Watson Group. The winners were Majestyk Apps with their adaptive educational platform, FANG (Friendly Anthropomorphic Networked Genome); Red Ant with their retail sales trainer; and GenieMD with their medical recommendation service. On July 9, 2014, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories announced plans to integrate Watson to improve their customer experience platform, citing

12212-625: The form of answers and they must identify the person, place, thing, or idea that the clue describes, phrasing each response in the form of a question. The original daytime version debuted on NBC on March 30, 1964, and aired until January 3, 1975. A nighttime syndicated edition aired weekly from September 1974 to September 1975, and a revival, The All-New Jeopardy! , ran on NBC from October 1978 to March 1979 on weekdays. The syndicated show familiar to modern viewers and aired daily (currently by Sony Pictures Television ) premiered on September 10, 1984. Art Fleming served as host for all versions of

12354-476: The full comprehension of newspaper articles or poetry passages. Many real-world applications fall between the two extremes, for instance text classification for the automatic analysis of emails and their routing to a suitable department in a corporation does not require an in-depth understanding of the text, but needs to deal with a much larger vocabulary and more diverse syntax than the management of simple queries to database tables with fixed schemata. Throughout

12496-611: The game down, he decided to accept any correct response that was in question form. Griffin discarded his initial title of What's the Question? when skeptical network executive Ed Vane rejected his original concept of the game, claiming, "It doesn't have enough jeopardies ." The format of giving contestants the answers and requiring the questions had previously been used by the Gil Fates -hosted program CBS Television Quiz , which aired from July 1941 until May 1942. Art Fleming

12638-399: The game used a board comprising ten categories with ten clues each, but after finding that this board could not easily be shown on camera, he reduced it to two rounds of thirty clues each, with five clues in each of six categories. He originally intended requiring grammatically correct phrasing (e.g., only accepting "Who is..." for a person), but after finding that grammatical correction slowed

12780-447: The game with $ 16,000. Until March 1, 2018, no regular game had ended in a tie-breaker. If no contestant finishes Final Jeopardy! with a positive total, there is no winner and three new contestants compete on the next episode. This has happened on several episodes, including the second episode hosted by Trebek. A winner unable to return as champion because of a change in personal circumstances – for example, illness or

12922-423: The game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words. Although the system is primarily an IBM effort, Watson's development involved faculty and graduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute , Carnegie Mellon University , University of Massachusetts Amherst , the University of Southern California 's Information Sciences Institute ,

13064-442: The game. Since May 16, 2002, consolation prizes have been awarded in cash—$ 2,000 for second-place contestants and $ 1,000 for third-place contestants. Since travel and lodging are generally not provided for contestants, cash consolation prizes offset these costs. Production covers the cost of travel for returning champions and players invited back because of errors who must make multiple trips to Los Angeles. Production also covers

13206-405: The games. To provide a physical presence in the televised games, Watson was represented by an " avatar " of a globe, inspired by the IBM "smarter planet" symbol. Jennings described the computer's avatar as a "glowing blue ball crisscrossed by 'threads' of thought—42 threads, to be precise", and stated that the number of thought threads in the avatar was an in-joke referencing the significance of

13348-425: The highest score at the end of the round is that day's winner. If there is a tie for second place, consolation prizes are awarded based on the scores going into the Final Jeopardy! round. If all three contestants finish with zero dollars, no one returns as champion for the next show, and based on scores going into the Final Jeopardy! round, the two contestants who were first and second receive the second-place prize, and

13490-486: The human players when to buzz, which was critical in many rounds. The humans were notified by a light, which took them tenths of a second to perceive . Watson was notified by an electronic signal and could activate the buzzer within about eight milliseconds. The humans tried to compensate for the perception delay by anticipating the light, but the variation in the anticipation time was generally too great to fall within Watson's response time. Watson did not attempt to anticipate

13632-418: The judges double-check their own rulings throughout each episode. If it is determined at any point that a previous response was wrongly ruled correct or incorrect during the taping of an episode, the scores are adjusted at the first available opportunity, typically either at the start of the next round/segment or immediately after a Daily Double is found, with the host providing any necessary explanation regarding

13774-503: The line producer was Lynette Williams. Griffin was the daily syndicated version's executive producer until his retirement in 2000. Trebek served as producer as well as host until 1987, when he began hosting NBC's Classic Concentration for the next four years. At that time, he handed producer duties to George Vosburgh, who had formerly produced The All-New Jeopardy! In 1997, Harry Friedman , Lisa Finneran (now known as Lisa Broffman), and Rocky Schmidt succeeded Vosburgh as producers of

13916-445: The most games and money in the previous season come back to compete against each other for a large cash prize. Tournaments generally feature 15 contestants and run for 10 consecutive episodes. They generally take place across three rounds: the quarterfinal round (five games), the semifinal round (three games), and the final round (two games). The first five episodes, the quarterfinals, feature three new contestants each day. Other than in

14058-436: The next taping, scheduled for November 9–10, 2020. In a New York magazine interview from 2022, then-consulting producer and former contestant Ken Jennings noted supervising producers Lisa Broffman and Rocky Schmidt had named him interim host for that taping and remembered his last conversation with Trebek days before rehearsal was to commence. In Sony Pictures Television's official Jeopardy! podcast in 2023, Broffman noted

14200-427: The notification signal. Since Deep Blue 's victory over Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997, IBM had been on the hunt for a new challenge. In 2004, IBM Research manager Charles Lickel, over dinner with coworkers, noticed that the restaurant they were in had fallen silent. He soon discovered the cause of this evening's hiatus: Ken Jennings , who was then in the middle of his successful 74-game run on Jeopardy! . Nearly

14342-414: The original Jeopardy! series premiered, Merv Griffin offered the following account of how he created the quiz show: My wife Julann just came up with the idea one day when we were in a plane bringing us back to New York City from Duluth . I was mulling over game show ideas, when she noted that there had not been a successful "question and answer" game on the air since the quiz show scandals . Why not do

14484-423: The overall standings. This format has been used since the first Tournament of Champions in 1985 and was devised by Trebek himself. To prevent later contestants from playing to beat the earlier wild card scores instead of playing to win, contestants are "completely isolated from the studio until it is their time to compete". If none of the contestants in a standard 15-player tournament format quarterfinal end with

14626-421: The pen malfunctions, contestants can manually write their responses and wagers using an index card and marker, although the index card has the required phrasing pre-printed on each side ("Who/What"). Visually impaired or blind contestants typically type their responses and wagers with a computer keyboard. Contestants' responses are revealed in order of their pre-Final Jeopardy! scores from lowest to highest. Once

14768-511: The phrase "U.S. city" did not appear in the question, there are cities named Toronto in the U.S. , and Toronto in Ontario has an American League baseball team. Chris Welty , who also worked on Watson, suggested that it may not have been able to correctly parse the second part of the clue, "its second largest, for a World War II battle" (which was not a standalone clause despite it following a semicolon , and required context to understand that it

14910-410: The popular tactic of buzzing before it is sure of its response. However, Watson has consistently better reaction time on the buzzer once it has generated a response, and is immune to human players' psychological tactics, such as jumping between categories on every clue. In a sequence of 20 mock games of Jeopardy! , human participants were able to use the six to seven seconds that Watson needed to hear

15052-425: The possibility of having Watson compete against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter , two of the most successful contestants on the show, and the program's producers agreed. Watson's differences with human players had generated conflicts between IBM and Jeopardy! staff during the planning of the competition. IBM repeatedly expressed concerns that the show's writers would exploit Watson's cognitive deficiencies when writing

15194-399: The previous clue chooses the next clue. Gameplay continues until the board is cleared or the round's time length expires, which is typically indicated by a beeping sound. The contestant who has the lowest score selects the first clue to start the Double Jeopardy! round. Since 2021, if there is a tie for the contestant with the lowest score, the contestant with the last correct question among

15336-424: The publication of his book Language as a Cognitive Process . At Stanford, Winograd would later advise Larry Page , who co-founded Google . In the 1970s and 1980s, the natural language processing group at SRI International continued research and development in the field. A number of commercial efforts based on the research were undertaken, e.g. , in 1982 Gary Hendrix formed Symantec Corporation originally as

15478-471: The purpose of advising medical institutions on equipment procurement decisions. In November 2013, IBM announced it would make Watson's API available to software application providers, enabling them to build apps and services that are embedded in Watson's capabilities. To build out its base of partners who create applications on the Watson platform, IBM consults with a network of venture capital firms, which advise IBM on which of their portfolio companies may be

15620-404: The question. The game ended with Jennings with $ 4,800, Rutter with $ 10,400, and Watson with $ 35,734. During the introduction, Trebek (a Canadian native) joked that he had learned Toronto was a U.S. city, and Watson's error in the first match prompted an IBM engineer to wear a Toronto Blue Jays jacket to the recording of the second match. In the first round, Jennings was finally able to choose

15762-477: The rehearsal for Jennings was scheduled November 8, 2020, but canceled when Schmidt gave staff the news that Trebek had died that day. At the time of Trebek's death, producers publicly declined to discuss any plans to introduce his successor while stating that they had enough new episodes with Trebek as host to run through Christmas Day. On November 9, 2020, the first episode to air after Trebek's death, executive producer Mike Richards paid tribute to Trebek, after

15904-403: The removal of the five-game limit in 2003, in the unlikely case of a tie in total winnings between two Tournament of Champions players, the player who won the most games receives the higher seed. If still tied, seeding is determined by comparing the tied players' previous aggregate scores. The winners of the five quarterfinal games and the four highest-scoring non-winners ("wild cards") advance to

16046-418: The returning champion selects a clue by indicating its category and dollar value. The two (or if there is no returning champion, three) challengers participate in a random draw prior to taping to determine contestant order, and if there is no returning champion, the contestant who drew the first lectern starts. The underlying clue is revealed and read aloud by the host, after which any contestant may ring in using

16188-407: The rule change, lights were added to the game board (unseen by home viewers) to signify when it is permissible for contestants to signal. Attempting to signal before the light goes on locks the contestant out for half of a second. The change was made to allow the home audience to play along more easily and to keep an extremely fast contestant from potentially dominating the game. In pre-1985 episodes,

16330-429: The season beginning with record-holding former contestant Ken Jennings , each hosting for a few weeks before passing the role onto someone else. Then- executive producer Mike Richards initially assumed the position of permanent host in September 2021, but relinquished the role within a week. Mayim Bialik and Jennings served as permanent rotating hosts of the syndicated series until December 2023, when Jennings became

16472-476: The second season of the new celebrity edition. In December 2023, after the strike was resolved, Sony announced that Jennings would remain the sole host of the syndicated series permanently, noting that it was still open to having Bialik host the prime time specials. Don Pardo held the role of announcer on the NBC version and weekly syndicated version, while John Harlan replaced him for The All-New Jeopardy! In

16614-404: The semifinals the way they are during the quarterfinals, show officials discovered a flaw after the 2013 Teen Tournament, because the triple zero loss happened in the second semifinal that allowed the third semifinal of the 2013 Teen Tournament to be played differently from the first (which was played before the triple zero loss). Starting with the 2013 Tournament of Champions, semifinal games, like

16756-451: The semifinals, which run for three days. The semifinals are seeded with the quarterfinal winners being seeded 1–5 based on their quarterfinal scores, and the wild cards being seeded 6–9. The winners of the quarterfinal games with the three highest scores occupy the champion's lectern for the semifinals. The winners of the three semifinal games advance to play in a two-game final match, in which the scores from both games are combined to determine

16898-453: The sheer volume of customer data to analyze. Watson has been integrated with databases including Bon Appétit magazine to perform a recipe generating platform. Watson is being used by Decibel, a music discovery startup, in its app MusicGeek which uses the supercomputer to provide music recommendations to its users. The use of Watson has also been found in the hospitality industry. Go Moment uses Watson for its Rev1 app, which gives hotel staff

17040-406: The show between 1964 and 1979. Don Pardo served as announcer until 1975, and John Harlan announced for the 1978–1979 season. The daily syndicated version premiered in 1984 with Alex Trebek as host and Johnny Gilbert as announcer. Trebek hosted until his death, with his last episode airing January 8, 2021, after over 36 years in the role. Following his death, a variety of guest hosts completed

17182-527: The show through the 2021–2022 season. Bialik also hosted the season's various tournaments and primetime specials. In July 2022, it was announced that Bialik and Jennings would return as co-hosts of the syndicated version. Jennings would host the Tournament of Champions and the new Second Chance Tournament, while Bialik would again host the primetime specials and spinoffs, including a new celebrity edition of Jeopardy! , which premiered in September 2022. However, in January 2023, ABC announced Jennings would host

17324-446: The show. Beginning in 1999, Friedman became executive producer, and Gary Johnson became the third producer. In 2006, Deb Dittmann and Brett Schneider became producers, while Finneran, Schmidt, and Johnson were promoted to supervising producers. Johnson left the show in 2011, while the other producers remained until Sarah Whitcomb Foss took over all producer duties following the Clue Crew's 2022 disbanding. The original Jeopardy! series

17466-436: The sole syndicated host. While Bialik was originally arranged to host additional primetime specials on ABC , and spin-offs , the announcement of Jeopardy! Masters in 2023 meant these duties were shared as well. Following Bialik's withdrawal in part of supporting writers and actors due to the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes , Jennings assumed hosting duties for all forms of media. Currently in its 41st season, Jeopardy!

17608-518: The speed of this circuitry compared to the speed of human reaction times, Watson's reaction time was faster than the human contestants except when the human anticipated (instead of reacted to) the ready signal. After signaling, Watson speaks with an electronic voice and gives the responses in Jeopardy! 's question format. Watson's voice was synthesized from recordings that actor Jeff Woodman made for an IBM text-to-speech program in 2004. The Jeopardy! staff used different means to notify Watson and

17750-551: The start of Trebek's hosting run to avoid the problem of contestants who stopped participating in the game, or avoided wagering in Final Jeopardy!, rather than risk losing the money they had already won. This also allowed the increase to clue values since only one contestant's score is paid instead of three. From 1984 to 2002, non-winning contestants on the Trebek version received vacation packages and merchandise, which were donated by manufacturers as promotional consideration. Since 2004,

17892-417: The tied players selects first. A "Daily Double" clue is hidden behind one clue in the Jeopardy! round, and two in Double Jeopardy! The name and inspiration were taken from a horse-racing term . Daily Double clues with a sound or video component are known as "Audio Daily Doubles" or "Video Daily Doubles", respectively. Before the clue is revealed, the contestant who has selected the Daily Double must declare

18034-407: The tournament, such as the 2020 Greatest of All Time or 2022 Tournament of Champions, or in the quarterfinals of tournaments without wild cards where a player must win the game to advance (21 or 27 players), the tie-breaker will be used regardless of the score being zero or positive for players to win the game and either advance to the next round or receive the point towards winning the tournament. This

18176-401: The two-game finals, must have a winner. Players who participate in Final Jeopardy! will participate in the standard tie-breaker, regardless of the score being zero or a positive score. Similarly, if all three players have a zero score at the end of a two-game match, a normal tournament finals format will proceed to a tie-breaker. In a tournament format where a player must win multiple games to win

18318-509: The way in which Watson works has been changed to take advantage of new deployment models (Watson on IBM Cloud ), evolved machine learning capabilities, and optimized hardware available to developers and researchers. Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework implementation. The system was written in various languages, including Java , C++ , and Prolog , and runs on

18460-409: The world." In 2013, it was reported that three companies were working with IBM to create apps embedded with Watson technology. Fluid is developing an app for retailers, one called "The North Face", which is designed to provide advice to online shoppers. Welltok is developing an app designed to give people advice on ways to engage in activities to improve their health. MD Buyline is developing an app for

18602-551: The years various attempts at processing natural language or English-like sentences presented to computers have taken place at varying degrees of complexity. Some attempts have not resulted in systems with deep understanding, but have helped overall system usability. For example, Wayne Ratliff originally developed the Vulcan program with an English-like syntax to mimic the English speaking computer in Star Trek . Vulcan later became

18744-419: Was added, executive producer Harry Friedman said, "TV is a visual medium, and the more visual we can make our clues, the more we think it will enhance the experience for the viewer." Following the initial announcement of auditions for the team, over 5,000 people applied for Clue Crew posts. The original Clue Crew members were Cheryl Farrell, Jimmy McGuire, Sofia Lidskog, and Sarah Whitcomb Foss. Lidskog left

18886-428: Was confirmed by Ken Jennings in a post-match interview posted on the show's website during the Season 40 Champions Wildcard Tournament. In the standard tournament finals format, contestants who finish Double Jeopardy! with a zero dollars or negative score on either day do not play Final Jeopardy! that day. Their score for that leg is recorded as zero dollars. In a 1963 Associated Press profile released shortly before

19028-549: Was created as a question answering (QA) computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing , information retrieval , knowledge representation , automated reasoning , and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering . IBM stated that Watson uses "more than 100 different techniques to analyze natural language, identify sources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence, and merge and rank hypotheses." In recent years, Watson's capabilities have been extended and

19170-591: Was directed at different times by Bob Hultgren, Eleanor Tarshis, and Jeff Goldstein. Dick Schneider, who directed episodes of The All-New Jeopardy! , returned as director from 1984 to 1992. He was then succeeded by his associate director, Kevin McCarthy , who served until his retirement in 2018. After McCarthy's departure, he was succeeded by Clay Jacobsen, who served through 2021 and was later replaced by Russell Norman. As of 2022, Jeopardy! employs seven full-time writers and seven researchers to create and assemble

19312-415: Was first used in 1985 by Chuck Forrest , who won over $ 70,000 in his initial run as champion. Trebek expressed that this strategy not only annoyed him but also the staff, since it disrupts the rhythm that develops when revealing the clues and increases the potential for error. Another strategy used by some contestants is to play all of the higher-valued clues first and build up a substantial lead, starting at

19454-671: Was hosted by Buzzy Cohen , winner of the 2017 tournament. On August 11, 2021, it was announced that Richards would succeed Trebek as host of the daily show and Bialik would host Jeopardy! primetime specials and spin-offs. On August 20, following a report from The Ringer exposing controversial remarks made on his podcast in the past, resurfaced controversies from Richards's time on The Price Is Right , and accusations of self-dealing regarding his executive producer position, Richards stepped down as host after taping only one week of episodes. Richards's five episodes as host aired in September 2021. Bialik and Jennings then alternated hosting

19596-408: Was named for a World War II hero ; its second largest , for a World War II battle "). Rutter and Jennings gave the correct response of Chicago, but Watson's response was "What is Toronto ?????" with five question marks appended indicating a lack of confidence. Ferrucci offered reasons why Watson would appear to have guessed a Canadian city: categories only weakly suggest the type of response desired,

19738-459: Was not in the creation of a new algorithm for this operation, but rather its ability to quickly execute hundreds of proven language analysis algorithms simultaneously. The more algorithms that find the same answer independently, the more likely Watson is to be correct. Once Watson has a small number of potential solutions, it is able to check against its database to ascertain whether the solution makes sense or not. Watson's basic working principle

19880-522: Was referring to a second-largest airport ). Eric Nyberg , a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the development team, stated that the error occurred because Watson does not possess the comparative knowledge to discard that potential response as not viable. Although not displayed to the audience as with non-Final Jeopardy! questions, Watson's second choice was Chicago. Both Toronto and Chicago were well below Watson's confidence threshold, at 14% and 11% respectively. Watson wagered only $ 947 on

20022-527: Was the original host of the show throughout both NBC runs and its brief weekly syndicated run, between 1964 and 1979. Alex Trebek served as host of the daily syndicated version from its premiere in 1984 until his death in 2020, except when he switched places with Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak as an April Fool's joke on April 1, 1997. Trebek was still serving as host, having taped his last episode on October 29, 2020, for an intended Christmas Day broadcast, when contingency plans were made for him to miss

20164-545: Was unable to pinpoint enough game states. A practice match was recorded on January 13, 2011, and the official matches were recorded on January 14, 2011. All participants maintained secrecy about the outcome until the match was broadcast in February. In a practice match before the press on January 13, 2011, Watson won a 15-question round against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter with a score of $ 4,400 to Jennings's $ 3,400 and Rutter's $ 1,200, though Jennings and Watson were tied before

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