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led to a tiny entry hall behind the auditorium. As the event began, shortly after 1 P.M., they waited. They listened as IBM introduced Watson to its customers. “You know how they call time-outs before a guy kicks a field goal?” Jennings said. “We were joking that they were doing the same thing to us. Icing us.” Through the door they heard speeches by John Kelly, the chief of IBM Research, and Sam Palmisano. Harry Friedman, who decades earlier had earned $5 a joke as a writer for Hollywood Squares, delivered one of his own. “I’ve lived in Hollywood for a long time,” he told the crowd, “so I know something about Artificial Intelligence.” When Ferrucci was called to the stage, the crowd rose for a standing ovation. “I already cried in makeup,” he said. “Let’s not repeat that.”

Finally, it was time for Jeopardy, and Jennings and Rutter were summoned to the stage. They walked down the narrow aisle of the auditorium, Jennings leading in a business suit and yellow tie, the taller, loose-gaited Rutter following him, his collar unbuttoned. They settled at their lecterns, Jennings on the far side, Rutter closer to the crowd. Between them, its circular black screen dancing with colorful jagged lines, sat Watson.

The show began with the familiar music. A fill-in for the legendary announcer, Johnny Gilbert (who hadn’t made the trip from Culver City), introduced the contestants and Alex Trebek. Even then, Jennings and Rutter had to wait while an IBM video told the story of the Watson project. In a second video, Trebek asked Ferrucci about the machinery behind the bionic player—now up to 2,880 processing cores. Then Trebek gave viewers a tutorial on Watson’s answer panel. It would reveal the statistical confidence that the computer had in each of its top responses. It was a window into Watson’s thinking.

Trebek, in fact, had been a late convert to the answer panel. Like the rest of the Jeopardy team, he was loath to stray from the show’s time-honored formulas. People knew what to expect from the game: the precise movements of the cameras, the familiar music, voices, and categories. Wouldn’t the intrusion of an electronic answer panel distract them and ultimately make the game less enjoyable to watch? Trebek raised that concern on a visit to IBM in November. But the prospect of televising the game without Watson’s answer panel horrified Ferrucci. Millions of viewers, he believed, would simply conclude that the machine had been fed all the answers. They wouldn’t appreciate what Watson went through to arrive at the correct response. So while Trebek was eating lunch that day, Ferrucci had his technicians take down the answer panel. When the afternoon sessions began, it took only one game for Trebek to ask for it to be restored. Later, he said, watching Watson without the panel’s analysis was “boring as hell.”

Finally, it was time to play. A hush settled over the auditorium. Ferrucci, sitting between David Gondek and Eric Brown, laced his hands tightly and made a steeple with his index fingers. He watched as Trebek, with a wave of his arm, revealed the six categories for the first round of Jeopardy. One was Literary Character APB. Trebek explained that APB stood for “all points bulletin.” This clarification was lost on the deaf Watson, which irked Ferrucci and the IBM team. Other categories were Beatles People, Olympic Oddities, Name that Decade, Final Frontiers, and Alternate Meanings. None of them looked especially vexing for the computer.

Rutter had won the draw, so he started and chose Alternate Meanings for $200. “A four-letter word for vantage point,” Trebek read, “or belief.” Rutter, famous for his prowess with the buzzer, won this first clue and responded correctly: “What is view?”

He asked for the $400 clue in the same category. Trebek read: “Four-letter word for the iron fitting on the hoof of a horse, or a card-dealing box in a casino.”

Watson won the buzz and uttered its first syllables for an audience of millions, answering correctly: “What is a shoe?” It pronounced the final word meekly, as if unsure of itself or perhaps