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Miller comments on IBM's "Watson" program to compete against "Jeopardy" champions tonight - Less Wrong Discussion
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Because the category titles are usually fairly complex puns, Watson is built to infer the theme of a category from the questions as it goes along. The humans would benefit from starting at the highest dollar and working towards the lowest dollar, so as to maximize their superior pun skills. I wonder if they'll do that.
IBM also sets a threshold on certainty for Watson answering a question. The machine is perfectly capable of 'howlers', answers that are completely unrelated to the question. These would embarass it if that threshold is too low, and possibly frighten clients of the technology this evolves into. Put the threshold too high, and it might be too cautious to win. I'm sure the tech geeks are mostly interested in winning, but the PR department might be interested in playing with style.
From what I saw, it seems they figured out that that was their best bet (somehow) fairly quickly. Once Watson lost control, the other two lost very little time in going for the big points.
Watching the first episode, there was an interlude where they had snippets of interviews with the creators. They happened to mention that the machine learnt within categories, and when play resumed the humans immediately switched to picking the most valuable categories first. I was impressed by that. It was good to see they were thinking strategically, and were listening closely.