IBM Watson wins Jeopardy! against human champions
IBM's Watson question-answering system defeated Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a televised two-game match aired 14–16 February 2011.
Key facts
- Final episode aired 16 February 2011
- Watson's total: $77,147 vs. Jennings $24,000 and Rutter $21,600
- Built on the DeepQA architecture combining many NLP and retrieval techniques
- Ran on a cluster of IBM Power 750 servers
What happened
Watson answered natural-language trivia clues in real time, beating the two most successful human players in the show's history.
Why it matters
A high-profile demonstration of open-domain question answering, a decade before LLMs made such capabilities general-purpose.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Sources (2)
id: 2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline