The long-awaited three-night "Jeopardy!" face-off between the show's biggest past champs and IBM's supercomputer Watson began last night, and the thing did pretty well, but not without a few hiccups (like the inability to understand a human appendage).

After dominating the first part of the game, Watson ended up tied with Brad Rutter, who famously has won the most money on "Jeopardy!" ($3.25 million) with a score last night of $5000. Ken Jennings, who has had the most consecutive wins on the show (74) trailed with $2000. 

Because the three-night event is an exhibition game, last night's game was short so that Trebek could explain Watson's rather complicated artificial intelligence system and take us on a tour of the computer's home at IBM in suburban New York. The computer seen next to to the contestants is just an avatar, and the real one takes up an entire room and consists of ten linked servers representing the power of 2,800 PCs. 

A few observations about this first night of Watson:

— Watson had at least two funny flubs. After Ken Jennings gave an incorrect response to a clue, the computer buzzed in and said the exact same thing.  The program also answered "What is leg?" to a clue about an unusual Olympic athlete. ["What is leg?" is already a bit of a catchphrase on Twitter (like here and here) and blogs today.]

Here's the "What is leg?" answer that at least I thought was so outrageously hilarious (also note how great Brad Rutter looks now that he's an aspiring actor!):

— While the show stressed that Watson is "not hooked up to the internet," it was hard for a non-computer-scientist regular "Jeopardy!" fan not to notice that Watson's brain seems to resemble a search engine. This was particularly noticeable when Watson kept getting the clues in one category "Beatles People" correct—each clue consisted of Beatle's song lyrics—something that would seem always easier for a computer than a person. (Think about it: how often do you do a search for song lyrics to try to remember the name of a song?)

— When Watson first took off, and was so heavily dominating the game, it was amusing to watch audience members—presumably IBM employees involved in the project's creation—beam at each other with almost parental pride. 

 Alex Trebek promised more of Watson's "weird little moments" in the next two nights of the game, so check back here to see those, because it's fun to mercilessly ridicule smarty-pants computers.