That was the most exciting half hour of television I've seen in a while!! I'm a computer science major (gradating in May... woohoo!) and it's soooo cool that this is possible!
For those who haven't heard about this - IBM created a supercomputer (named Watson) that can receive the question, and using some crazy-smart algorithm, find an answer in its memory. And it can decide how confident it is with the answer, and only "buzzes in" when it's confidence is above a certain threshold.
I feel like such a dork, but how cool is that?!? It's a 3 day tournament, so it'll be continuing tomorrow. The computer is competing against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two best Jeopardy contestants so far. Yay technology!!