Watson's been under development for about two years now. Officially considered a , it follows in the footsteps of IBM's previous human-demoralizing machine, . (Deep Blue, in case your nonsupercomputing mind has forgotten, in 1997 and won.) It goes without saying, though, that with a decade of extra technology evolution under its belt, Watson will be even stronger than its predecessors.

Watson will likely be built on an architecture comparable to , Ferrucci says. Translation: It'll be fast. Really fast. Blue Gene runs on speeds described with terms such as petaFLOPS and teraFLOPS (and no, those have nothing to do with excessive forehead sweat -- they measure FLoating point Operations Per Second). While Watson's specifics have yet to be finalized, the fastest possible processing is what engineers are after.

"Because of the high levels of precision and confidence required, and the fact that you have do this very quickly, you require massive parallel computation," Ferrucci says.

Not feeling mush-brained yet? Consider this: Watson will also run with no network connection of any kind. Instead, all of its data will be internally stored -- just like a real "Jeopardy" contestant.