So. Slashdot put this up today:

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/12/14/1350206/Jeopardy-To-Pit-Humans-Against-IBM-Machine

(and the yahoo news article it links to: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101214/ap_en_tv/us_tv_man_vs_machine)

It was quickly pointed out in the comments that this has come up before, but this is actually the first time I've seen it, and it's very interesting to me. Of course, in some ways the most interesting thing is the discussion of exactly what's going to be tested. The humans and computers have radically different limitations, after all. Humans tend to have limited databases of information (so to speak), but zero problem interpreting the question; computers tend to have vastly larger databases of available information, but problems with translating a question into a meaningful (and correct) query to retrieve the answer. So you could argue that, for a properly constructed set of questions on the part of the Jeopardy writers, it would be testing both the algorithm-writers down in IBM Research and the data absorption/recall of Jennings and Rutter at the same time.

Nifty stuff.