Best idea for game shows for years, now a complete and utter farce...

I hadn't watched Jeopardy! in a long time, but I was still intrigued by the ongoing Jennings/Rutter/Watson Man vs. Machine IBM Challenge match.

In fact, it got me to watch episodes for the first time in a long time, where the computer, at least through one of the two games, has utterly crushed the two human grand champions.

After one game:

Watson: $35,734
Brad Rutter: $10,400
Ken Jennings: $4,800

Tomorrow, presumably, Watson and his IBM handlers will be handed a check for one million dollars (which, according to the show's website, will be split between World Vision and the World Computing Grid).

So, why does this win Rig Job of the Day?

Not by pre-decision, though it could certainly, win or lose, be seen as a massive commercial for IBM.

But this appears to be a rigging by construction -- that the advantage gained because of events constructed through the play basically ends any hope of a valid contest. (Which see the entire Steroid Era in Major League Baseball for a very good sports analogy.)

How do I say this?

A paragraph from this eweek.com article.

"Watson appeared to have breezed through Double Jeopardy, but that was apparently not the case. During the course of the game, Watson had crashed multiple times during the taping, said NOVA producer Michael Bicks, who had been at the taping of the show. The half hour match took four hours to tape, he said."

Any hope of a competitive contest went out the window, especially if you're the likes of Jennings and Rutter, who would like to have taken home $500,000 for themselves and a half million for VillageReach or the Lancaster County Community Foundation, respectively.

But how can you expect a human being to stand up to that kind of intellectual pressure in a stop-and-start environment (unplanned to be as such, on top of it!) for four solid hours and take on a supercomputer??

The best idea for game shows in years, a technical showcase, now basically a full-on farce.

Not rigged by pre-ordainment, but through what happens when someone doesn't perform a regular debug on the system.