[FaceKicker]

It's hard to say if that really makes it "unfair", since a lot of Ken Jennings' (and every other Jeopardy champion's) success was due to his reaction time with the buzzer. That's simply a huge part of the game.

On the other hand, nobody would dispute that a machine has faster reactions than a human, so maybe that makes it less interesting. Tough to figure out a great way to resolve that.

[nonsequ]

Having actually played against Watson, it certainly feels unfair when you've got a response you're 100% sure of on the tip of your tongue but you have to wait several long seconds for the question to be read. All the while you're desperately aware that Watson's reaction time is always 100 ms and yours ranges from 50-200 ms.

It is interesting to watch machines encroach on things we once considered exclusively human mental abilities. In the early days processors just multiplied large numbers faster than we could. Then they beat a grandmaster at chess and now a machine is definitely better at Jeopardy.

[bradleyt]

If you had data indicating what Ken Jennings' reaction time was, you could probably calibrate Watson to roughly match that.

[jerf]

Yes, but is that fair?

What is fair? Defining fair in terms of equal outcome is vacuous here.

For a bit I thought it would be more interesting to let the humans ring in as soon as they had read the question, but the problem is that today they would slaughter Watson, and three years from now Watson would slaughter them, and possibly without even updating its software.

I suppose the most fair thing to do would be to do away with the buzzer entirely. Let all players choose whether or not to answer all questions (that is, all three could get it right, all could get it wrong, one right, one abstain, one wrong, etc), and check the scores at the end. Without the buzzer advantage for Watson I suspect Jennings and Rutter still win... for another year or two, anyhow.