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.
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.