I was really impressed by Watson. His first choice was the daily double though, so I think he hacked it, haha.
It seemed like for the answers it was very confident on it could react faster than Brad and Ken. It always was the first to buzz in, and jumped to a huge lead. I don't know if that is true, but its pure reaction time may be its winning factor.
> its pure reaction time may be its winning factor.
Indeed. Jennings himself has said that his buzzer instincts and reflexes created his winning streak more so than actual knowledge. You can easily see that when he clicks and then comes up with the answer a few seconds later. About half of all Jeopardy questions are known by all three players so it's a tossup as to who buzzes the fastest.
I'm not entirely clear how Watson buzzes. The general Jeopardy buzzer system is that an offstage operator presses a button to enable the buzzers as soon as Alex is done speaking. That button also turns on a light near the board to alert the contestants. If you press too early, there's a 300ms lockout until you can press again. We've been told that Watson uses a physical arm to press the Jeopardy buzzer, but we haven't been told exactly how Watson times it: does it listen for Alex to stop speaking, or use an optical sensor on the light, or some other method. An optical sensor would seem pretty hard for humans to beat on timing.
