Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0050/
Milestone · February 14 – 16, 2011
Watson on Jeopardy!
IBM’s Watson won televised Jeopardy! matches against two of the strongest players.
Why it matters
The public demonstration showed that answering questions from a large text corpus could work inside the real-time constraints of a game.
The matches aired on 14-16 February 2011. Watson combined search over a large body of text, rule-based parsing and statistical classifiers, and machine-learned ranking of the evidence for each candidate answer, rather than a large language model of the current kind.
Event record
- Event date
- February 14, 2011 – February 16, 2011
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 27, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0050
Related events
Earlier
Later
- Related AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol 2016links to this record
Both concern public matches in which a system played against the strongest human players.
- Builds on 62 million dollars on Watson with no clinic 2016links to this record
According to the report, Lynda Chin decided to apply Watson to cancer treatment after its Jeopardy! win in 2011 and approached IBM herself; the first contract was signed in June 2012.