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That Trebek gave Watsom credit for "Maxwell's silver hammer" when the clue was looking for the person – Maxwell – gave me a moment's pause.

Jeopardy does tend to be a little more forgiving of contestants during the first round – such as giving them a reminder to phrase-as-a-question, and letting them correct an initially wrong or incomplete utterance, if done almost instantly. Still, I'm not sure if such a interpretive error by a person would have been overlooked.



I noticed that, too; but a little later in the game, Trebek declared "leg" (instead of "he was missing a leg") wrong without hesitation.

So it's definitely being held to some standard.


Actually, according to arstechnica, that lack of hesitation was before the segment was reshot.

A human had answered "missing a hand," which created context that means "What is a leg" could be interpreted as "he was missing a leg". Initially Alex did give him credit, before realizing that Wattson couldn't have been using that context.

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2011/02/ibms-watson-tied-f...


OK, so I have a question about this, how was it legitimate for Brad to answer at this point? Brad would have seen Alex initially credit Watson with the right answer and then reverse the judgement, rendering the answer incorrect. Brad would have been able to infer the correct answer at this point.


In fact, Brad didn't answer the question... I was wondering about that since the answer was obvious just from Ken's guess and Watson's response.


Very interesting; thanks for the clarification. I was fooled.


Apparently he actually initially declared that as correct before realizing that Watson didn't have the context to be going off of Ken's incorrect answer. Hurrah for editing.


This sort of overanswering seems to be usually accepted, as long as the correct answer is contained in the wrong one.




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