Watson should have had to actually *listen* to the question, parse it, figure it out, *then* press the button and answer.
The way it was run it got the question in a digital instant while the humans had to wait while Alex read it in a few linear seconds. No matter how you slice it there is a bias towards the computer in that setup which allowed Watson to ring in more quickly than the humans.
They didn’t have a chance, even though Watson got a lot of answers wrong.
They didn’t have a chance..
Exactly, that is like a calculator versus man with paper and pencil to do math. No contest.
Yeah, I wondered about the button pushing too, that’s a really big part of the show.