E-mails, we get e-mails...

"RP" writes regarding my post about Jeopardy's Man vs. Machine...

"I saw about half of yesterday's show on DVR before I had to leave...I'll watch the rest of that and today's episode tonight. Lots of "how we did it" filler. My biggest complaint to this point regards ringing in on an answer. The show alleges that Watson has to pop the buzzer like the human contestants. They also continuously show a graph of Watson's level of confidence on an answer as it is still being read aloud (Watson gets it as a text file). Above a certain confidence threshold, Watson will ring in. I don't think I saw any answer that Watson wanted to ring in on where the humans were actually able to beat him on the buzzer. I guess that changes later on the lower levels of the board where the answers are harder, but when I had to leave, it was a slaughter. Watson had several thousand dollars, and Jennings and Rutter each had about $200. They could never get in for an answer."

This link has some good information about the computer's strengths and weaknesses.