Meet Watson. He's the newest contestant on Jeopardy!, and boy does he have his work cut out for him. Starting Monday, February 14, he’ll compete against the greatest Jeopardy! players of our generation: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But Watson is no slouch.  He’s got 15 terabytes of memory and can think fast, we’re talking 80 trillion operations per second. Did we mention that Watson is a supercomputer?

Last year technology writer Clive Thompson visited Watson at IBM to watch him gear up for the big match. Clive told Kurt that thanks to the internet, scientists have fed millions of digitized documents into Watson’s “brain.” As soon as Alex Trebek gives the clue, Watson scans the documents and runs hundreds of algorithms to come up with the most statistically probable answer.

Watson is about the size of 10 refrigerators (and requires at least that much Freon to stay cool), but on Jeopardy! he'll appear as a tall flat screen monitor. According to Clive, his synthesized voice “sounds a little like the movie War Games… the computer that almost destroys the world in thermonuclear holocaust.” 

We humans are always a little touchy on this subject. From Terminator to The Matrix, we often envision a world of future enslavement by our machine overlords. But Watson reminded me of a different cinematic supercomputer...

In the 1957 movie Desk Set, a wall-sized blinking behemoth called EMERAC (Electro-Magnetic Memory and Research Arithmetic Calculator) takes over a TV network’s research department. Far from wiping out the human race, EMERAC brings together Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn for a rom com full of workplace hijinks. Let’s see Watson top that.

Update Thursday 2/17: It was game over for Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter who were defeated by Watson last night. The computer’s final score: $77,147. Jennings finished with $24,000 and Rutter was a close third with $21,600. Jennings took the loss in stride -- below his Final Jeopardy response he wrote “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” (a nod to The Simpsons, no less)

As the winner of the $1 million prize, IBM says it will donate $500,000 each to World Vision and World Community Grid.  For second place, Jennings took home $300,000 and for third, Rutter received $200,000.

(Sarah Delia and Michael Guerriero contributed to this article.)