[tantalor]

Watson’s hand looks like a clear, Plexiglas, cylindrical soda can with a few metal screws in the top and a wire extending from the bottom that is connected to Watson’s Front-End Controller. The mechanical hand wraps around the Jeopardy! buzzer which is inserted in the bottom of the Plexiglas cylinder and is held in place by a clamp. Watson’s hand uses a solenoid to physically press the same button that the humans must press.

Watson’s hand is pretty fast in terms of raw speed — it takes somewhere between five and ten milliseconds for Watson to activate the buzzer once it decides to answer. This delay is affected by the speed of the solenoid and other small, sometimes hard-to-pin-down delays inherent in the software stack.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-buzzer-factor-did-watson-have-...

I wonder if the human decision-to-buzzer time is much slower?

[infinite8s]

Typical human response time to a stimulus is about 200ms. That of course doesn't factor in the decision time, but once the brain decides on an action it takes about 200 Ms for the signal to propagate to the relevant muscles.

[mortehu]

https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime seems to agree with you. The median there is 215ms, which probably includes some unmeasurable rendering and input latency.

In Jeopardy, though, people can anticipate the moment the buzzer becomes active.

[cjbprime]

How about exceptional human response time, as for pro gamers or Jeopardy players who have predicted the stimulus?