IBM Watson on Jeopardy! (2011) › 2011: IBM Watson on Jeopardy!
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In February 2011, IBM's Watson competed in a televised Jeopardy! match against Ken Jennings, who had won 74 consecutive games, and Brad Rutter, then the show's highest-earning contestant. Watson won the two-game exhibition match.
Earlier question-answering systems such as BASEBALL worked over narrow, structured databases. Jeopardy! required broader coverage and more varied language. Its clues, called "answers" on the show, can contain cultural references, puns, indirect descriptions, and constraints on the expected response type. A competitive system also had to estimate confidence and decide when to buzz.
Watson combined natural language processing, information retrieval, supervised scoring models, and parallel computation to answer open-domain trivia clues under time pressure. Its performance showed what a large, task-specific question-answering pipeline could achieve with broad text collections and extensive engineering.
The broadcast also made a technical question-answering system visible to a mass audience. Viewers could see the system answer correctly, abstain when its confidence was low, and make characteristic errors when its evidence scoring failed.