It's man versus machine on Jeopardy!, as two of the game show's most successful players compete against an IBM supercomputer four years in the making.

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Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter will take on the IBM computer, lovingly referred to as Watson, with a $1 million prize at stake.

Scientists spent years filling Watson with information.

Phil Resnik, a professor of linguistics and computer science prof at the University of Maryland, described Watson's database as, "Tons and tons of knowledge that comes from dictionaries, thesauruses, and lots and lots of text that comes from the Internet, novels."

But the real challenge may have been programming it to answer questions posed in natural human language.

Watson, which is the size of ten refrigerators, has a globe-like brain structure. Lasers passing through it demonstrate how confident the computer is in its answer.

"If he's very confident that he has, or IT has -- shouldn't personalize it -- that Watson has the correct response, those lines will be green," said Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. "They'll be orange if he's uncertain."

Alexandria resident Mike Arnone is a five-time Jeopardy! champion from 2000. He knows exactly what Watson is up against.

"[T]he challenge for it is going to be on the semantic level, understanding what does the language actually mean," Arnone said.

While Watson is faster and won't get tired or distracted, the human mind might have an the edge when it comes to understanding questions a computer might not 'get'. It's already happened in the practice round.

"We were asked what movie star played piano in the movie "Ray" and learned to play the violin in the movie "The Soloist"," recalled Brad Rutter, one of the competitors. "Do you know who that is? Jamie Foxx. Watson thought it was Beethoven. Watson said, 'Who is Beethoven?'"

The grand prize for this challenge is $1 million. If Watson wins, IBM will donate the money to charity. Both human champions say if they win, they'll donate 50 percent of their prize.

Experts say down the road, the artificial intelligence technology behind Watson will be useful in fields like medicine, perhaps to help diagnose patients, and in customer service to provide faster support by phone.