Afraid not, the machine would still consistently win.

What Moonie said, a computer can still act faster and (more importantly) more c consistently to a light than a human. There's not a whole lot that can be done about it. The BEST they could do is introduce an artificial random delay to mimic human hesitation - but it still doesn't leave Watson susceptible to the "early trigger lockout" hazard that humans are.

I saw an article that asked about speech recognition and the engineers said getting a adequate recognition capability is still a decade away.

As for responding to the light that would really be just as instantaneous as responding to a signal sent directly to him (since all the signals involved are moving at the speed of light).

Oops, missed the next page with the two previous responses.

I think that's a bit pessimistic. For example, Vonage recently added visual voicemail (rather, they stopped charging extra for it), and it's been remarkably accurate in its transcriptions of voicemail messages. Considering the utter crap that I saw coming out of Google Voice's visual voicemail just a couple years ago, I find it hard to believe that it will take another decade to take care of the few minor issues. Perhaps processing speed is still an issue?

But let's assume the article is right and there really is still a big gap to traverse to get fast enough voice-to-text, how about visual processing? Just have Watson read the clue off the screen. My cheap-o scanner does darn good OCR, it couldn't be that difficult to get Watson to read the very legible Jeopardy board.

True, I'm sure there was hyperbole in that number and probably none of the people on the Watson team are experts on the state of voice recognition. But I could see it being not so much of a problem with accurate transcription as the processing time of the transcription. 1 second of lag for visual voicemail isn't noticeable but one second of lag for Watson would have just flipped the buzz-in advantage since unlike the human players Watson wouldn't be able to read faster than Trebek talks.

OCR would be fine, but once in place, dealing with a completely standardized font it probably wouldn't be a significantly slower interface than just getting it as a text file. But that part really isn't a big deal, as Ken Jennings has said, for the best players they almost always know the answer (or have comprehended the question well enough to know they will know the answer and want to buzz in) before the buzzers are active so it all comes down to that.

To eliminate the buzz-in advantage I think what I might have done (though I haven't thought this through very much) is have run response time tests with the two human players to see what their average buzz in times were after activation for questions they knew the answer to, along with standard deviation and then programmed a random delay into sending the signal to Watson that matched that statistical distribution.

Then we'd have a true test of Jeopardy skills instead of the already known fact that a person who knows a lot of answers but always wins the buzz in will usually beat the person who knows all the answers but can't buzz in if anybody else does too. I could be Ken Jennings at Jeopardy if I always had first option to answer.

So basically, the best players at Jeopardy are the ones who time the button pushing the best, not necessarily the people who know the answers the best. Yes, you have to have the knowledge, but a less knowledgeable person could theoretically edge out a more knowledgeable one based on button-push timing alone.

To some degree yes, but I'd bet that Ken or that other guy could handily beat me even if I had first crack at all the questions.

According to Jennings, at the level of people who make it to Jeopardy yes. He has said that at that level all the players know the vast majority of the answer before the buzzers are active and it just comes down to who can consistently win that battle.

I figure that on the average board I know 65-80% of the answers, assuming that I could resist the temptation to buzz in when I didn't, first crack should give me at least the lead going into Final Jeopardy every every time (there's still the variable of where the ones I know are distributed and who gets the daily doubles).

But where does that 20-35% you don't know fall? Wouldn't it trend towards the higher value answers?

Not necessarily, it tends to fall into categories. If "Grunge Bands" comes up I'm only going to get the Pearl Jam question and then likely only if I answer Pearl Jam to all of them. In categories where I don't have much knowledge I can frequently say what two or three of the answers will be just from the name, the problem is I have no idea what question they match to.

But I did say "there's still the variable of where the ones I know are distributed."