By David Young
The long-running television quiz show ‘Jeopardy!’ will run a three-day-long stint between two of its previous champions and the computer named Watson starting Tuesday. The current and prospective students of the university will get to view the match, after hearing panel discussions about computer science from professors and alumni who now work for IBM, and has been working on the project since 2007.

Christopher A. Lynch, professor of computer science at Clarkson said, “It sounds like science fiction, but it's really happening. I think it’ll be interesting to computer science students at Clarkson, just to learn about things that have been used for this. To high school students, it’ll get them interested in computer science.” The college has already sent out invitations to local students who have expressed interest in attending the event.

The event will be hosted by Kierre L. Daniels, a 1999 graduate, who appeared on the show several years ago, finishing in second place and winning $2,000. “I did pretty well against a couple of humans, but you throw a computer into the mix and who knows?” said Daniels, who lives in Schenectady. “The ability to reason and to think and even to ring in, this computer has to be just as smart at they are, just as fast as they are, if not better.”

Designing a computer to play the famous game show was much more complicated than simply knowing a set of rules. For that, the computer has to be able to understand language and nuances, even puns, and then be able to extract an answer from all of its stored knowledge. “When they started working on it, it couldn’t answer many questions but they seem to have it at the level where it can play against champions,” said Lynch, who heads the math and computer science department. “It won't wipe the floor with the humans, but it’ll be a good game.”

Watson will be up against “Jeopardy!” champions Ken Jennings, who set the record by winning 74 games in a row and $2.5 million, and Brad Rutter, who won $3.2 million, the most money won by any single player in the game’s history. In a practice round held in January, Watson had managed to edge out both former champions by winning $4,400, as Jennings won $3,400 and Rutter won $1,200.

Lynch hopes that the event will convince more people to think about studying computer science. “People aren’t as interested in computer science as they should be, but there’s a lot of jobs there,” Lynch said. “When the dot-com thing happened, everybody wanted to be in computer science but since then, interest has dropped off. I wanted to show people what kind of cool things computers can do.”