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Ken Jennings was Robbed

Color me ultimately unimpressed with IBM's computer playing Jeopardy! The game is perfectly rigged to allow the computer to win.

Picture this: Ken Jennings reads the question on the board in 1-2 seconds and figures out the correct answer. He then has to wait 6-10 more seconds until he's allowed to ring in. At that point, the computer receives a high-speed clock signal telling it that it can ring in if it has the answer, and it responds as quickly as the signaling will allow. We're certainly talking orders of magnitude faster than human reflex time.

After just 1-2 seconds, the computer likely has very little confidence in its answer. So it would either have to be made more aggressive to beat out its opponents and give more incorrect answers as a result…Or Ken Jennings would answer a lot more questions. In fact, I'm sure that if you could ring in whenever you wanted, the computer would have had its ass handed to it.

Now, none of this says the next edition of the computer would lose – at some point, it'll have enough computational power to answer every question in under one second. But for now, giant shrug…

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