The category on the Dec. 18 episode of "Jeopardy!" was "U.S. News & World Report Best of 2014," and the question to the $1,000 answer was obvious.

Answer: When it comes to a computer science Ph.D. program, this university in Pittsburgh leads the field.

Question: What is Carnegie Mellon University?

(Check out the video clip below.)

It was perhaps the easiest $1,000 that contestant ever won. CMU's Ph.D. program in computer science is consistently ranked No. 1 by U.S. News & World Report.

The Jeopardy question coincides with SCS25, the silver anniversary of the founding of the School of Computer Science. It also extends the university's association with the game show, which is watched by an estimated 25 million people every day.

CMU's connections with Jeopardy include a student winner of the 2004 Jeopardy College Championship and, most notably, the contributions of SCS faculty and students to IBM's Watson, the question-answering system that competed (and won) against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a historic "man vs. machine" match in February 2011.

Eric Nyberg, professor in the Language Technologies Institute, had a long-standing collaboration with IBM, which included development of the Open Advancement of Question-Answering Initiative (OAQA), which encouraged the creation of a computer architecture and methodologies that could be used by researchers to support the Watson system.

Nyberg and his students contributed directly to Watson as well, developing two important pieces of Watson's software — an algorithm for identifying the best written sources for a given topic and another that helped Watson identify the most likely answer. Nyberg and Teruko Mitamura, LTI research professor, and students Nico Schlaefer and Hideki Shima subsequently won the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence for their work on question-answering systems.