Early indications suggest that Watson will be favored in its competition against Jennings and Rutter since the supercomputer already beat its opponents in a practice round in January. But Watson is not an unstoppable machine and does have its weaknesses, especially if the clue involves a high degree of wordplay or ambiguity. It's anybody's guess who will win tonight, but in honor of what may be Watson's intellectual triumph over humanity, here is a look at the rise of the supercomputer in human history. Watson is seen as a giant leap forward in artificial intelligence because to play Jeopardy it had to understand and answer English language questions using idioms and common expressions. This is unlike previous computers, which required specific input keywords before they could respond to human speech.

While debate on military robots heated up this month thanks to UN talks about the development of lethal autonomous robots--and military robots are evolving quickly thanks to defense budgets--household robots remain far from ubiquitous. More than a half-century after the world's first industrial robot, Unimate, began work at a General Motors plant, most commercial robots still work in factories. The ones that are in households, such as the roughly 10 million robot vacuum cleaners led by iRobot's Roomba, have usually been limited to performing one task only, like sucking up dirt. Computers and robots can beat us at dedicated tasks like chess or painting cars, though humans still have a massive intelligence advantage in terms of general knowledge. That's a good thing if you fear a robot uprising.

For decades, scientists have fantasized about creating robots with brain-like intelligence. This year, researchers tempted by that dream made great progress on achieving what has been called the holy grail of computing. Today, a wide variety of efforts are aimed at creating intelligent computers that can progressively learn and make smarter decisions. Millions of dollars this year were poured in efforts to create "silicon brains," or neuromorphic chips that mimic brain-like functionality to make computers smarter. The new chips could give eyes and ears to smart robots, which will be able to drive, identify objects, or even point out rotten fruit.

Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, a company that builds robots that mimic the movements of humans and animals with stunning dexterity and speed. "We are looking forward to this next chapter in robotics and in what we can accomplish as part of the Google team," Boston Dynamics co-founder Marc Raibert said via email. Boston Dynamics is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the past six months, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news on Friday. Earlier this month, the Times reported that Google has named former Android chief Andy Rubin as the company's lead for its robotics projects. On its YouTube channel, Boston Dynamics has videos of its impressive robots, including WildCat, a four-legged robot designed to run fast in all terrains, Cheetah, which tops 28 miles-per-hour, and Petman, a human-like robot that balances himself as he walks, squats and does calisthenics, and simulates human physiology by controlling its temperature, humidity and sweating, according to the company.

Text-mining software is one of the front-line tools that the government is now using to tease out valuable connections. These specialized search engines can quickly sift through mountains of unstructured text anything that's not carefully arranged in a database or spreadsheet and pull out the meaningful stuff. They can infer relationships within data that are not stated explicitly. It is something we do all the time automatically but is enormously complicated for computers. "We bridge the gap between information and action," says Barak Pridor, CEO of ClearForest, a text-mining company.

Robots don't see the world like humans do, at least not yet. They don't recognize discrete objects and have little common sense--that it's better to drive over a bush than a rock, for instance. They use a variety of sensors--cameras, laser range finders, radar--to gauge the shape, slope, and smoothness of the terrain ahead. They then use these data to figure out how to stay on the road and avoid obstacles. At least that's the idea, but the DARPA Grand Challenge showed it's a lot harder than it sounds.

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"People love the wizards in Harry Potter or'Lord of the Rings,' but this is real," said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley artificial intelligence specialist and a co-founder of Industrial Perception Inc., a company that is building a robot able to load and unload trucks. "A new species, Robo sapiens, are emerging," he said. The debut of Atlas on Thursday was a striking example of how computers are beginning to grow legs and move around in the physical world. Although robotic planes already fill the air and self-driving cars are being tested on public roads, many specialists in robotics believe that the learning curve toward useful humanoid robots will be steep. Still, many see them fulfilling the needs of humans -- and the dreams of science fiction lovers -- sooner rather than later.

This November in Yemen, an unmanned Predator plane -- known as a drone -- blew up a car full of suspected Al Qaeda members. The plane's ''remote pilot'' sat in a trailer located miles out of harm's way. The Pentagon considers unmanned planes like the Predator perfect for ''the 3 D's'': missions that are so dull, dirty or dangerous that it's best to leave humans out of the equation. The Predator is just the start of what may well be the largest shift in military tactics since the invention of gunpowder -- a wholesale removal of American personnel from the front lines. This year at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the biggest advance yet in robotic warfare took its first flight: the UCAV, or Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle.