This week, Jeopardy is pulling a major stunt and pitting top champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter against Watson, an IBM computer. Is this worth blogging? Eh, why not.

It’s starting. They’re giving us background on the tournament and players, and catching up with Ken Jennings, who is apparently impervious to the human aging process. Now they’re explaining how Watson works. Watson is a huge computer designed for the sole purpose of playing Jeopardy. Yeah, sounds like a fair fight.

Now Trebek is explaining what an avatar is to a 7PM game show audience. Wow, the Watson “avatar” sure is hideous — what’s with the mesmerizingly awful pencil scrawl animation? Now we’re going to talk about it for eight minutes.

Okay, okay, the exposition is dragging…

Finally, the game is on.

Watson is off and running. Ken and Brad look kinda bummed. The computer designed for the sole purpose of playing Jeopardy is (predictably) whupping their ass(es). This could be a painful week.

Come on Ken and Brad! Ring in before you know it, then mumble a few vocalized pauses until the answer comes to you! Stoop to techniques lesser contestants have used to their advantage!

Cutaway to a cute little video piece in which a bunch of IBM nerdstra talk about engineering the supercomputer, then giggle over beta-Watson’s weak practice games. Sheesh, all the IBM engineers look really young. I guess we’re supposed to notice that IBM is now a hip young company, like Google or something. Okay, it’s turning into a big IBM commercial.

Phew, back to the action.

Watson just chimed in after Ken Jennings with the same incorrect answer, resulting in a snide correction by Alex Trebek. Good to know that  Alex Trebek is able to insult any contestant, regardless of sentience.

Commercial.

Wait, what? Double and Final Jeopardy tomorrow? Okay kids, we’ll pick this up then.