When the producers of Jeopardy! e-mailed me in October 2009 to ask if I wanted to spar against Watson, its game show–savvy supercomputer, my first thought was: “I’m going to lose.” My apprehension was reinforced several months later while signing the hefty nondisclosure agreement after noting that no one who had won more than two episodes of the show was allowed to face off against the machine. (I had won twice the previous fall.) It was then that I realized I was the trivia equivalent of chum, fated to be tossed overboard as bait for a still-adolescent Watson.

In the months before Watson faced off against his primary human opponents, 74-time champ Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the quiz show’s highest-earnings player, IBM recruited several hundred former contestants to playtest it on all of the soft skills required to win at Jeopardy!, including buzzer speed and betting strategy. The sparring matches were staged in a mock studio off the lobby of the company’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center (named after IBM’s founder), in Yorktown Heights, New York, where the real-life Watson’s famous dictum “THINK” is mounted in the lobby. The building’s vintage 1960s, Eero Saarinen–designed interiors are reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which felt appropriate, considering we had come to see a modern-day HAL.

The studio had been hastily constructed in the room adjacent to Watson’s hardware, a cluster of IBM POWER7 servers comprising 2,880 processing cores stuffed full—really full—of facts and algorithms. His brains were hidden behind a curtain and double-paned windows, the dull roar of his cooling fans still faintly audible. As far as actual game play was concerned, verisimilitude was the goal—the contestant podiums and buzzers were near-perfect replicas of those on the show, and IBM had even hired an archly funny host (actor Todd Alan Crain) to stand in for real host Alex Trebek.