Michael The great American quiz show "Jeopardy!", in which three contestants are confronted with all sorts of trivia questions, have to press big red buttons, and then quickly give the correct answer, is now entering its 47th year. It was created in 1964 by media mogul Merv Griffin and has been running in practically the same format ever since.
From a blue "wall" with questions valued from 200 to 2000 dollars, the contestant whose turn it is selects one, similar to the old days on the German show "Der Große Preis" with Wim Thoelke. The host reads the question aloud, and then the contestant who presses their red button first is allowed to answer.
The correct answer earns the specified dollar amount for the contestant. However, a wrong answer causes the respondent's account to decrease by the corresponding amount, even if it goes into the negative.
To give the old format a fresh touch, the moguls of the TV network ABC allowed the company IBM to let a computer named "Watson" participate in the game for three evenings. The questions were electronically fed to it, with a slight delay to simulate the response speed of the two human participants. The computer, a cluster computer housed in a cooled data center, analyzed the question, searched for the answer without internet access, and presented the three most likely answers, each with a percentage indicating the confidence level.
The result: The computer completely crushed the other two human participants, who were the most successful Jeopardy winners to date. It excelled not only in wordplay, sports events, and scientific questions, but also in TV series and film star trivia. A magnificent success for the engineers at IBM who programmed the wonder machine and, as clips showed, experienced quite a few surprises with the answers from earlier versions of Watson.
The Watson featured in the show also had its quirks: Once, it repeated a contestant's wrong answer and mercilessly lost points. And when it came to risk questions, it consistently bet absurdly odd amounts (like $7,493) to the amusement of the audience, which it had likely calculated through statistical analysis. A likable android!