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SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah trivia master Ken Jennings takes on a new and somewhat unfeeling competitor this week on the game show "Jeopardy!"
Coming up on KSL Newsradio
Jennings and another "Jeopardy!" whiz, Brad Rutter, will face off against Watson, the IBM supercomputer, in a three-day battle that pits human versus machine in the ultimate challenge of trivial knowledge.
Trivial knowledge is what gave Jennings unexpected celebrity status after 74 consecutive "Jeopardy!" wins and more than $2.5 million in earnings.
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When he was mowing down opponents en route to a record of 74 wins in a row on the game show "Jeopardy!" Ken Jennings often seemed more machine than man.His unprecedented game-show success came from a change in "Jeopardy!" rules that allowed contestants to play until they lost rather than be cut off after five games. The rules change, accompanied by his strange ability to remember random trivia and his astute buzzer technique, led Jennings to win the most consecutive "Jeopardy!" games ever, a record that still stands. Not only did he win those 74 games, for the most part he blew the other contestants completely out of the water, answering 92 percent of buzzed-in responses correctly and locking up victories before the Final Jeopardy question in 65 of his 74 games.
Rutter, however, the show's biggest all-time money winner and the second-biggest all-time money winner on a game show, soon passed Jennings' record of most money won on "Jeopardy!" by racking up more than $3.2 million.
IBM began developing Watson in 2005, about the same time Jennings was making his record run.
The challenge was to develop something more advanced than Deep Blue, another IBM machine that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Watson required more nuance, the ability to understand puns and word games that are often part of the "Jeopardy!" experience.
Story written with contributions from [ Stephanie Moreton ](<mailto: smoreton@desnews.com>) and The Associated Press.**
