In the end it was a pointless exercise. Recognition and retrieval is what computers do and the individual(s) who prepped the machine all but admitted that the only variable would be the timing of the buzz-in.
The Jeopardy! puns are a) usually lame and b) dead giveaways so claiming that the computer would need some sort of powerful A.I. to decipher them was spurious at best.
I’m a programmer. Never worked with AI but I imagine getting a program to recognize puns and wordplay and other features of natural language is incredibly difficult. What is impressive is not that it could quickly pull the answer out of a database but rather that it could understand the clue enough to know what information to look for.
In general, open-ended questions are a bitch for a computer to answer. Chess is easy with enough computing power, just have it look so many moves ahead and factor in snapshots of all of the famous games in history, even better, all of the games of the current opponent. It’s a big problem, but it’s still closed at the end, finite.
Jeopardy can ask any question about anything in natural language form. That’s a LOT harder to program for.
THIS, big deal.