Between February 14 -16, the popular show, Jeopardy will pit IBM’s intelligent machine ‘Watson’ against some of Jeopardy’s past champions Ken Jennings who has won 74 straight games, and Brad Rutter who is all the time money winner for Jeopardy, with $3 million in earnings and an 20-0 record, according to CTV.

IBM, through 20 researchers, has been working to build ‘Watson’ for three years now. It wanted to create a machine that would counter and outperform the 2002 chess-playing winner Deep Blue, according to USA Today.

“We have created a computer system which has the ability to understand natural human language, which is a very difficult thing for a computer to do… In the field of artificial intelligence, people spend their lifetimes trying to advance that science inches. What Watson does and has demonstrated is the ability to advance the field of artificial intelligence by miles.” said John Kelly who is a director of research at IBM to the Washington Post.

The reason ‘Watson’ is being seen as so exceptional is that Jeopardy questions are rarely straightforward, and have a lot of innuendos, metaphors, double meanings to consider before giving a correct answer.  ‘Watson’ is also programmed to use statistics, and not just understands standard functions of a word, but aims to put it into context using millions of documents in its system, according to CTV.

Although ‘Watson’ is imperfect, and has been shown to make mistakes, George Lugar, a computational linguistics expert at the University of New Mexico thinks that ‘Watson’ is a huge advancement and the run-up to computers becoming actual personal assistants, according to USA Today.

With this intelligent machine, IBM still wants to portray itself as a leader in technological advancement in this Apple-dominated era. In a statement, IBM says “Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context of human language, and rapidly process information to find precise answers to complex questions, holds enormous potential to transform how computers help people accomplish tasks in business and their personal lives.”