In 2007, IBM computer scientist David Ferrucci and his team embarked on the challenge of building a computer that could take on—and beat—the two best players of the popular US TV quiz show Jeopardy!, a trivia game in which contestants are given clues in categories ranging from academic subjects to pop culture and must ring in with responses that are in the form of questions. The show, a ratings stalwart, was created in 1964 and has aired for more than 25 years. But this would be the first time the program would pit man against machine.

In some sense, the project was a follow-up to Deep Blue, the IBM computer that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Although a TV quiz show may seem to lack the gravitas of the classic game of chess, the task was in many ways much harder. It wasn’t just that the computer had to master straightforward language, it had to master humor, nuance, puns, allusions, and slang—a verbal complexity well beyond the reach of most computer processors. Meeting that challenge was about much more than just a Jeopardy! championship. The work of Ferrucci and his team illuminates both the great potential and the severe limitations of current computer intelligence—as well as the capacities of the human mind. Although the machine they created was ultimately dubbed “Watson” (in honor of IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson), to the team that painstakingly constructed it, the game-playing computer was known as Blue J.

The following article is adapted from Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, February 2011), by Stephen Baker, an account of Blue J’s creation.