In the first man vs. machine competition, IBM's custom-built Thursday defeated all-time Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a practice round of the popular television game show.

The real are slated to be taped today at IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center for television viewing from Feb. 14 to Feb. 16.

For IBM, the Jeopardy challenge represents the next stage in the challenge of creating computers that can mimic human intelligence. David Ferrucci, the scientist leading the Watson team, said in a previous interview that the challenge of natural language processing can be intense because of the many ways the same information can be conveyed.

An IBM team of scientists spent four years building a computer system that can in answering questions posed in natural language. While IBM has been fairly mum about the bulk of Watson's architecture, it has acknowledged that it is powered by an IBM Power 7 server.

"After four years, our scientific team believes that Watson is ready for this challenge based on its ability to rapidly comprehend what the Jeopardy clue is asking, analyze the information it has access to, come up with precise answers, and develop an accurate confidence in its response," said Ferrucci in a statement.