Tonight is the first day of the 3-day Jeopardy joust between IBM’s “Watson” computer and human champions Ken and Brad.  Whose side are you on? Who will be your valentine —  Ken, Brad, or Watson?

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The professional gamblers are predicting a big win for Watson.  A while back, one oddsmaker – Bodog,com – predicted that Watson would win two to one.  That seemed reasonable to me till I read this interesting article by Ryan Holznagel, a previous Jeopardy winner.  He’s predicting Brad will be 1st, Ken 2nd and Watson 3rd.  He believes that Watson will win until Final Jeopardy, but then, because of the human players’ crazy betting behavior, the computer will be confused.  You can read the whole article here:

http://www.who2.com/blog/2011/02/watson-vs-humans-a-jeopardy-champs-view.html

All I know for sure is who the winner won’t be.  The winner won’t be Octo-woman.  She doesn’t have any trouble with the answers.  It’s the questions she funbles.

We have to face it though.  We’re already relying on the computer to retrieve so much trivia that pretty soon, we’ll have to google our own photos in order to remember who we are. Human memory retrieval will likely be as old-fashioned as, say, hand-making chocolates.  Now it’s funny I should mention that.

This week, my granddaughter Gretchen (Warden) Stark, did exactly that.  She made home-made chocolates for Valentine’s Day.  I don’t know how they turned out, but I think she’ll enjoy watching another little candymaker in action.  When watching it, you can pretend like she’s making Macademia Nut Clusters.

This is part of the Valentine card crafted by the British artist Jacquie Lawson.  The greeting cards offered on her website,  http://www.jacquielawson.com
are the coolest of any of the similar sites I’ve seen.  I bought a paid subscription a while back and, except for the 3D cards my sister Joan makes on real paper, I haven’t found any I like better.

I have to go now.  It’s time to get back to reading World Book Encyclopedia.  I have to cram before Jeopardy comes on.