It appeared during Monday's game that both university teams had some difficulty getting their timing down, but Watson seemed to get locked out now and again too. Still, while the "Jeopardy" games Jennings played were run in a "scrupulously fair" manner, "without its buzzer edge, Watson isn't yet good enough to beat top human players," he wrote on his site.

And Watson wasn't always so adept at parsing human language, Ferrucci said during a talk prior to the game. "There was a lot of work that went into developing the algorithms."

He showed a series of "Jeopardy" clues posed to Watson in its earlier days.

The room exploded with laughter when Ferrucci showed Watson's response to a clue referring to "the Father of Bacteriology," or Louis Pasteur: "How tasty was my little Frenchman."

While Watson has been able to defeat human players, the world should take solace in the sprawling amount of technology and research this feat has required, according to Ferrucci. The human brain "fits in a shoebox," he noted, and can run on the energy supplied by "a tuna sandwich."