OTTAWA — Forget Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Residents of the nation’s capital have a reason to cheer for Watson, the multi-million machine that is attempting to beat two of Jeopardy’s greatest champions and change forever the way people interact with computers.

That’s because key components of Watson’s ‘brain’ were developed here in Ottawa, largely thanks to IBM’s acquisition of Cognos Inc. in 2008.

“I’d say that the neurons on which Watson runs had large contributions from Ottawa,” said Marshall Schor, one of the 25 researchers responsible for Watson. “We had some very nice help from the team there in helping us figure out some performance issues that we came upon. They were very helpful in overcoming those.”

The company’s Ottawa lab, on Riverside Drive, was called upon by IBM to create a better way for the super computer to move information through its internal networks. Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, contains the equivalent of 100 million books worth of information. The machine was fed data from numerous commercial sources, such as the World Book Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, as well as books from the digital library Project Gutenberg. It’s also made up of 90 computer servers, which use 2,880 computer processor cores and 15 Terabytes of RAM or computer memory. It is not connected to the Internet. The computer works by executing multiple computer algorithms at blinding speeds in order to prioritize answers. The answers are prioritized from most likely to least likely, the most likely answer is given by Watson.

To complete the technological beast, IBM had 25 researchers work for more than four years pulling together different technologies from the company’s global base of researchers.

Routing information through Watson’s numerous internal systems takes special knowledge and so IBM’s team of researchers looked North for help.

Employees at IBM’s Ottawa labs, which have a long history of helping businesses sift through reams of data, jumped at the challenge.

“The team here in Ottawa has been developing virtual machine technology for years,” said Rob White, director of the Ottawa software lab site. “It was very natural that the Java Virtual Machine would underpin the Watson project.” The Virtual Machine is a programming language that routes information quickly through a computer network. In effect, the employees at the Ottawa labs provided a central nervous system for Watson allowing it to react quickly much like a person feels a pin prick in the finger the instant it happens thanks to nerves sending a pain signal to the brain.

In Watson’s case, the computer must read a Jeopardy question, interpret its meaning, search through its database and then respond before its two human competitors. The task is made even more difficult because the game’s clues involve analysing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other quirky complexities that machines have traditionally had trouble deciphering. The IBM Ottawa virtual machine software is a key component in how Watson accomplishes that task.

On its first day on the game show, Watson tied legendary Jeopary champion Rutter, who has won more than $3.3 million on the show. The two both won $5,000. Jennings, who has won around $3 million on Jeopardy and is best known for his 74-game win streak, finished with $2,000. On Tuesday night’s show, the machine added $35,734 to its total while Jennings netted only $2,400 and Rutter just $5,400.