But the rules have already been bent to help Watson in areas where it's weak:

• receives question (and answers) as coded text, rather than having to sight-read or listen to them

• no audio/video clues

• no categories that require an extra Trebek-explanation

It may even be receiving a direct signal when it's OK to ring in, rather than assessing Trebek's cadence and the same light-indicator as the human contestants rely upon.

So other 'balancing' changes shouldn't be out of the question.

I particularly like the idea that the penalty for a moment-too-early buzzing could be eliminated, and/or treating all buzzes in a small window around the traditional earliest-allowed moment as simultaneous. That still rewards quickness, without heavily advantaging the computer's ability to perfectly synchronize with the buzzing-period.

Once two buzzes are considered simultaneous, the contestant chosen to answer could rotate in round-robin fashion, or (for maximum drama) be the one furthest behind.

AFAIK, Watson was just using the light signal to decide when to start buzzing in. Just the light, ignoring when Trebek was going to finish saying something.

Presumably a human could consistently beat Watson to the buzzer by predicting when the light would go on.

Not sure about 'consistently', though trying to predict the light seems a reasonable strategy to attempt.

There's a lock-out that applies if you buzz too early, and the variance of the 'beats' between Trebek's finish and the light, if that's a human-mediated process, may be far larger than Watson's light-fired reaction time.

The easiest and fairest fix would be to hook Watson's buzzer up to a dataset of previous Tournament of Champion question-winning buzzer times. Or just use Ken and Brad's previous buzzer times for even more control. Pick a new human-achievable reaction time for every question.

We already know that computers have an advantage over human reaction time. We don't need Watson to tell us that, my laptop can press a button faster than I can. This is like requiring each player to run a mile before being able to answer the question... and then letting one guy drive a Corvette instead.

Of course, the impressive thing is that Watson can answer the questions at all.

The point being that at the highest levels of play, all of the contestants know most of the answers. This is a very important thing to remember. It means that even in all-human games, it's not "do you know the answer" but "can you ring in fast enough."

So it still is really quite impressive that reaction time matters at all to Watson, because it implies that it can compete at the highest levels.

And if the challenge IBM set for itself was "can we build a machine that travels faster than a person", that would be perfectly legitimate too.