In the end, though, its brain only has 80% of the processing power of a human brain.

Tony Pearson, master inventor and senior consultant at IBM, explained that Watson only uses about 1TB to process real-time answers to Jeopardy questions after configuring its back end storage as RAID, and then culling that data further to be loaded into the clustered server system's memory.

Pearson cited the estimate of technology futurist and author Ray Kurzweil that the human brain can hold about 1.25TB of data, and performs at roughly 100 teraflops. In comparison, Watson is an 80-teraflop system with 1TB of memory.

"So it's 80% human," Pearson said. "Yes, we could have handled a lot more information. We could have put more memory in each server, but once we got the answers to three seconds, we didn't need to go further."

Pearson explained that reaching the three-second answer threshold was just a matter of simple mathematics.