IBM supercomputer Watson will compete against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a first-of-its-kind competition to be aired February 14-16.

Watson is the product of four years of work by 25 scientists at the Thomas J. Watson Research Headquarters in Yorktown Heights, NY. It's the 50-year anniversary of the completion of Yorktown facility, which was designed by Eero Saarinen. Saarinen is known for a other major works in the United States, including the St. Louis Arch.

The Watson lab is considered one of the last, if not the last, of the major historical American technology research labs still in existence and functioning.

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Watson Sr. (1874–1956) was hired in 1914 to manage the merger of the three companies that combined to become International Business Machines. Over the next several decades Watson built one of the most important companies in American business history, a firm that would play a central role in the development of computers. A technology pioneer, IBM holds vastly more patents for inventions than any other American company.

"IBM is not merely an organization of men; it is an institution that will go on forever," Watson was fond of saying.