Is 'Jeopardy!' elementary, Watson?

Two of "Jeopardy!'s" biggest brainiacs - Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter - will compete in a three-day event today through Wednesday (5 p.m. on WLNY/10/55 and 7 p.m. on WABC/7) for a chance to win $1 million.

Having past winners compete is nothing new. It's the third contestant that makes this showdown different.

They'll be playing Watson, a super computer. That might not sound like a fair fight until you realize "Jeopardy!" requires more than just knowledge. Often the answers are provided in the form of puns and other word games.

Watson is programmed to understand the word play of human language. (The computer is named for IBM co-founder Thomas J. Watson.)

It's the computer's internal architecture, said David Ferrucci, head of the IBM team behind Watson, that makes it able to be on the game show.

"It's looking at so many different algorithms, thousands of different algorithms, some of them focused on understanding the question, weighting the various terms, looking at the grammar, the syntax, finding the phrases, the keywords, the entities, the dates, the times, trying to understand what exactly is it even asking for," Ferrucci said. "But ultimately, what's exciting about it is how it looks at many, many different possibilities and assesses them and builds a confidence in a final answer to decide whether or not it's correct and whether or not it wants to risk buzzing in on 'Jeopardy!' "

As for the prize money, if Jennings or Rutter win, they get half and the rest goes to charity. If Watson wins, all the money goes to charity.

- Fresno Bee