Good Question: What exactly is this computer named Watson?

If you have been captivated by the Jeopardy IBM Challenge you are not alone.

Some folks in Lexington even held a watch party Tuesday night.

In his second night of competition, Watson the first ever non human competitor blew Jeopardy's two biggest money winners ever out of the water!

Good Question: What exactly is this computer named Watson?

Tuesday night famous Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter were no match for the IBM computer known as Watson.

Watson is a super computer, it is filled with so much info it would take a human 250,000 years to read.

His knowledge and ability to play has even blown host Alex Trebec away.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we would ever have a non human contestant," said Trebec.

Watson is entirely self contained, meaning it is not connected to the Internet.

When given a clue, Watson's technology generates thousands of possible answers.

A complex computation process narrows the clues down to the top three Watson thinks could be right.

Tuesday it seemed that was a majority of the time.

Watson is the result of 25 IBM research scientists who have spent the last four years perfecting this technology.

If you are into the lingo, Watson is powered by 10 refrigerator sized racks of IBM power systems.

It runs on the Linux operating system, contains 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores.

Watson can operate at 80 teraflops or 80 trillion operations per second.

Ken Jennings may have squashed the competition in the past, but he's feeling the pressure from this machine.

" I thought, no technology is not there yet and to actually see the level it plays at is amazing. Its as good as the best human players at Jeopardy," said Jennings.

The IBM Jeopardy Challenge concludes Wednesday, the winning contestant's money will be donated to charity.

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