IBM supercomputer Watson’s Game 1 blowout of Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter may not have come as much of a surprise, considering how much information is packed inside the machine’s brain.

But that hasn’t prevented some decidedly human sour grapes about another perceived advantage of the machine: its seemingly superhuman ability to ring in first, blocking Jennings and Rutter from even having a chance to answer many clues.

In Jeopardy, it’s not enough to know the correct response to a clue. Unless you can ring in fast enough, you can’t win. And indeed, as the game progressed, Jennings and Rutter appeared frustrated at how quick Watson seemed on the draw.

So does Watson have an unfair speed advantage over Jennings and Rutter? Wired.com put the question to IBM Watson researcher Eric Brown in an interview ahead of the final showdown Wednesday.

Wired.com: So is this a fair fight, or what?

Brown: When we’ve talked with Jeopardy champions they all recognized that there are two parts to winning at Jeopardy. The first part is actually knowing the answer to the questions, and the second part is winning the buzzer, so that you actually get to answer the questions. You have to do both of those if you’re actually going to win the game.

What we’re trying to focus on is that this is a demonstration of question-answering technology. The goal really is not ultimately to win Jeopardy, but rather to demonstrate the ability of the Watson technology to understand a natural-language question and generate candidate answers from all sorts of unstructured data, text data, documents, etc., and then use a wide variety of analytics to evaluate evidence for those answers, and then generate a confidence.

The speed issue is more interesting when you look at the amount of computation that is required to actually do all that processing, and come up with an answer and a confidence that tells Watson whether or not to even try to ring in. To be able to do that fast enough is really the key. Once you’ve done all of that, then it’s a matter of pressing the buzzer.

Wired.com: How does Watson actually ring its buzzer?

Brown: Watson has a mechanical button-presser. It uses the same signaling device [the button] that the human competitors use in the game. Once Watson has decided that it wants to ring in because it has found an answer with a high-enough confidence, and it receives the signal that the buzzers are open and you can ring in, it then has to trigger the mechanical button presser and mechanically press the button.

Wired.com: At the beginning, Watson didn’t have a mechanical button-presser, did it?

Brown: Early on, during some of early sparring games [Watson played approximately 135 practice games], the initial implementation did not have a mechanical button-presser, and in fact Watson actually sent an electronic signal back to the Jeopardy control system indicating that it wanted to ring in. Ultimately Jeopardy and IBM decided that it would be more fair if we used the same signaling device as the human players, and so we then added the mechanical button-presser. We used that for all of our 55 matches against the Tournament of Champions players last fall.

Wired.com: So how do you respond to critics who say Watson has an unfair advantage because it can ring in faster?

Brown: Ultimately, this is being portrayed as a human-vs.-computer competition and there are some things that computers are going to be better at than humans and vice versa. Humans are much better at understanding natural language. Computers are better at responding to signals.

That said, humans have the ability to ring in just as fast has Watson does. In our experience the best Jeopardy players time their attempts to ring in. On the Jeopardy set there is a light that comes on when the signaling devices are open and you can now attempt to ring in, but the best players have told us they don’t even look for the light, they just listen to Alex Trebek’s cadence [Watson lacks ears] and then ring in at the appropriate time. And when you talk to Jeopardy players who have played against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, they say that those two are very fast.

Wired.com: And of course, the best Jeopardy players sometimes ring in before they may have come up with the answer, if they have, dare I say it, a gut feeling or sense of intuition that they’ll be able to answer correctly, right? Watson can’t do that, can it?

Brown: The IBM Research team made a decision that we were not going to ring in unless Watson had already computed an answer with high-enough confidence. There are human players who may have an intuition that they know the answer but don’t quite have it on the tip of their tongue, and are willing to ring in because they are confident enough that they will come up with the correct answer in the few seconds they have to actually answer after they’ve won the buzz. That was an implementation decision for Watson that it had to have an answer with a high-enough confidence before it would attempt to ring in.

Photo: IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center Lab at Dusk. (Bryan Derballa/Wired.com)

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