---
id: "2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2011-02-16"
date_precision: day
category: milestone
importance: 4
confidence: medium
status: [Partly confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2011-02-16-ibm-watson-jeopardy/

# IBM Watson wins Jeopardy! against human champions

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

## What happened

Watson answered natural-language trivia clues in real time, beating the two most successful human players in the show's history.

## Why it matters

A high-profile demonstration of open-domain question answering, a decade before LLMs made such capabilities general-purpose.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [IBM: Watson, Jeopardy! champion](https://www.ibm.com/history/watson-jeopardy) (ibm.com, official)
2. [Wikipedia: IBM Watson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson) (en.wikipedia.org, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created