Me and Ken Jennings are blood rivals. I called him Quiz Kid Donnie Smith once on Twitter a long time ago and he responded by typing variations of “you’re not famous” all afternoon. Blood rivals.

So it is with great interest as both a wrestling fan and a Not Famous Guy that I share with you these behind the scenes shots of Jennings having a “Trivia Death Match” to promote his app. Guess what it’s called! Ken’s opponent is none other than El Fénix Mundial, the most famous luchador in all of … uh, the Seattle metropolitan area. He’s a legit luchador, don’t get me wrong. You can tell by the fact that he once wrestled fat lucha libre Wolverine.

Ken has lots of love to give, he just doesn’t know where to put it, as seen in this excerpt from Ken-Jennings.com:

A lot of people see these pics and are like “Which one are you, Ken?” Fénix and are both in pretty awesome shape but I’m the one in the cooler outfit. Anyway, the masked marvel could not have been a nicer guy. ¡Gracias por todo, Fénix!

Here are a few more pics from the match (also from Ken-Jennings.com, via Facebook), spotlighting Ken’s love of pro graps fun and his slow descent into being Daniel Tosh’s nerdy dad.

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If you missed out on the man-versus-machine match on “Jeopardy!” earlier this week, we humans basically got our asses kicked. Watson, the IBM supercomputer designed for the two-game match, won with $77,147. Former “Jeopardy!” champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter finished with $24,000 and $21,600, respectively.

Everyone involved seemed to recognize this as a historic event in computing, and if you haven’t read Jennings’s chat on the Washington Post website from Tuesday or his piece on Slate yesterday, you’d be entertained by both. A sampling from the former:

Q: I was suprised that you only got through the first round. I found too much of the first night devoted to IBM, like a long commercial. What is the format of the next two nights?

A: The contest is two games stretched out over three nights: another half game tomorrow, with the final game Wednesday. In addition to giving IBM a nice infomercial spot (if you buy a Watson 1.0 license for home use, you also get a Watson mouse pad and some steak knives!) the documentary spots help explain how the contest came together, why this truly represents an AI breakthrough, and so forth.

It reminds me of the “human interest” stuff that always clogs up Olympic footage. Revealed tonight: Watson hopes to win these games for its adorable little sister, who has leukemia!

Other computer conquests of humans in games include Deep Blue’s controversial chess win against Garry Kasparov in 1997 and the CPU opponent against me every time I play Madden. How does that damn game ALWAYS come up with 2 touchdowns in the last 1:15? Total bologna.

Watch Double and Final Jeopardy! of Game Two after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »