Existence of God: In the News Computer Puts Evolution In
“Jeopardy” Science fiction writers have been portraying the
face-off between computers and humans for years. Ever so often,
what once was science fiction becomes a reality. Such is the
case with the upcoming television showdown between the two most-
winning contestants from the popular game show “Jeopardy” and a
new supercomputer named Watson (Fitzgerald and Martin, 2011). On
February 14-16, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter will be challenged
by the latest in computing technology. The humans in the contest
are certainly no slouches. Jennings won 74 “Jeopardy” games in a
row. And he and Rutter combined to amass over 3.3 million
dollars in prize money. Their challenger, Watson, an IBM
supercomputer named after the founder of the company, can store
the equivalent of over 200 million pages of information, is “the
size of 10 refrigerators,” and is the “result of four years of
work by IBM researchers around the globe.” In a practice round
with the human champions,