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a new car. Jennings quickly reviewed the clue. On his second reading, something about the wording suggested to him that the medieval lovers were historical figures, not literary characters or their creators. He said he couldn’t put his finger on it, but it had “a flavor of history.” At that point, the names of the French philosopher Peter Abelard and his student and lover, Heloise, popped into Jennings’s mind. It was the answer. He just knew it. It was their correspondence, the hundreds of letters they exchanged after their tragic separation, that qualified them as a literary pair. He pronounced the names as time ran out, pocketed the $12,000, and moved on to the next clue.

In answering that single clue, Jennings displayed several peerless qualities of the human mind, ones that IBM’s computer engineers would be hard-pressed to instill in a machine. First, he immediately understood the complex clue. Unlike even the most sophisticated computers, he was a master of human language. Far beyond basic comprehension, he picked up nuance in the wording so very subtle that even he failed to decode it. Yet it pushed him toward the answer. Once Abelard and Heloise surfaced, more human magic kicked in: He knew he was right. While a Jeopardy computer would no doubt weigh thousands, even millions, of possibilities, humans could look at a mere handful and often pick the right one with utter confidence. Humans just know things. And good Jeopardy players often sense that they’ll find the answer, even before it comes to mind. “It’s an odd feeling,” Jennings wrote in his 2005 memoir, Brainiac. “The answer’s not on the tip of your tongue yet, but a light flashes in the recesses of your brain. A connection has been made, and you find your thumb pressing the buzzer while the brain races to catch up.”

Perhaps the greatest advantage humans would enjoy over a Jeopardy machine was kinship with the fellow humans who had written the clues. With each clue, participants attempt to read the mind of the writers. What response could they be looking for? In an easy $200 category, would the writers expect players to recognize a Caribbean nation as small as Santa Lucia? With that offhand reference to “candid,” could they be pointing toward Voltaire’s Candide? Would they ever stack the European Capitals category with two clues featuring Dublin? When playing Jeopardy, Jennings said, “You’re not just parsing the question, you’re getting into the head of the writer.” In this psychological aspect of the game, a computer would be out of its league.

Computers, of course, can rummage through mountains of data millions of times faster than humans. But humans compensate with mental shortcuts, many of them honed over millions of years of evolution. Instead of plowing through copious evidence, humans instinctively read signals and draw quick conclusions, whether they involve trusting a stranger or deciding where to pitch a tent. “Mortals cannot know the world, but must rely on uncertain inferences, on bets rather than demonstrable proof,” wrote the German psychologist Gert Gigerenzer. In recent decades, psychologists have unearthed dozens of these rules, known as heuristics. Many of them would guide humans in a Jeopardy match against a much faster computer.

The most elementary heuristic is based on favoring the first answer to pop into the brain. That one automatically starts in the front of the line; it is more trusted simply by virtue of arriving early. Which ideas pop in first? Following another heuristic, they’re often the answers contestants are most familiar with. Given a choice between a well-known place or person or an obscure one, studies show that people opt for what they know. “If you ask people, ‘Which of these two cities has a larger population,’ they’ll almost always choose the more familiar one,” said Richard Carlson, a professor of cognitive psychology at Penn State. Usually this works. If a Jeopardy player has to name the most populous cities in a certain country, the most famous ones—London, Tokyo, Berlin, New York—often fit the bill. This approach