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Watson, IBM's supercomputer, easily bested the world's two most successful hot dog eaters in a televised "man versus machine" competition that aired Thursday on CBS.
Five-time world champion Takeru Kobayashi and current champ Joey Chestnut put forth valiant efforts, with 71.5 and 75 hot dogs, respectively, in 12 minutes each. However, Watson won comfortably, consuming 6,353 hot dogs in 31 seconds.
"People sometimes call me an eating machine," Kobayashi said, "but today I learned a valuable lesson in humility from an actual eating machine. My congratulations to IBM."
Engineers at IBM modified Watson since his Jeopardy! appearance, adding a 1,400-cubic-foot storage compartment and a hydraulic scoop arm that allows the computer to consume several hundred hot dogs at a time. A powerful compacter then compresses the meat and bread until it forms a nearly homogeneous sludge, leaving a maximum amount of space for the next wave of hot dogs.
"Watson employs a sequential brute force storage algorithm implemented at a physical level," said Eric Shulman, the project's head analyst. "That's a lot of jargon, but essentially what he's doing is taking the same food you or I might eat, and he is eating it, in his own way."
Humans can only process up to about two hundred "bites" of food, Shulman said. He went on to explain that Watson's advantage isn't necessarily that it has room for more bites, but rather that the bites themselves are far larger.
Some criticized the project as having created little more than a half-sentient trash can that serves no practical purpose. They claimed that it wasn't nearly as significant a milestone for technology as last year, when an earlier version of Watson knocked out WBA heavyweight champion boxer David Haye with a single punch.
But Shulman insisted that Watson's victory has far-reaching implications.
"The ability to eat is intrinsic to our very identity as humans," he said. "If Watson can eat a thousand hot dogs today, imagine what's possible tomorrow. He could eat food for entire cities. Watson could eat all the food in the world."
"I think what we're doing is challenging people's notions of human competitive supremacy. Watson has conquered trivia, he's conquered eating and once he manages to learn a song that isn't 'Daisy Bell,' he'll be well on his way to conquering singing too."
IBM plans to enter Watson in this year's eighth grade spelling bee, where Shulman expects him to "dominate." Shulman also hinted that Watson's utter lack of emotion could make him a strong contestant on Fear Factor.
