IBM Supercomputer 'Watson' Sweeps Jeopardy Practice Round

Meet Watson, aspiring Jeopardy champ. He's a black rectangle with a globe avatar, and he absorbed 200 million pages of text to prepare for the game show.

Watson is the IBM (IBM) supercomputer sent to do battle with human contestants on Jeopardy. He analyzes the vast amounts of information in his databases to come up with contextual clues that let him understand human language, spotting subtleties like the difference between a dog's bark and a tree's bark, CNN reported.

It's going pretty well. Watson won a practice round of the game show, netting $4,400 and answering no questions incorrectly. It wasn't a walkover – he stayed silent during the "Children's Books" category.

Still, the supercomputer, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson is already a crowd pleaser at a show with categories like "A man, a plan, a canal... Erie!" and "Chicks Dig Me." The audience roared with laughter when Watson came off with game show speak like "Let's finish up 'Chicks Dig Me.'"