{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy","date":"2011-02-16","date_precision":"day","short_title":"IBM Watson wins Jeopardy! against human champions","deck":null,"takeaway":"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.","category":"milestone","category_label":"Milestones","importance":4,"confidence":"medium","status":{"key":"partly","labels":["Partly confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"IBM: Watson, Jeopardy! champion","url":"https://www.ibm.com/history/watson-jeopardy","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"ibm.com"},{"n":2,"title":"Wikipedia: IBM Watson","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson","type":"discussion","group":"reactions","domain":"en.wikipedia.org"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["IBM"],"title":"IBM Watson wins Jeopardy! against human champions","summary":"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"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["question-answering","nlp","games"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nWatson answered natural-language trivia clues in real time, beating the two most successful human players in the show's history.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nA high-profile demonstration of open-domain question answering, a decade before LLMs made such capabilities general-purpose.","disputed":[],"related":[],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/ibm-watson-wins-jeopardy"}