Project Debater was paired with three champion human debaters in parliamentary-style public debates, with both sides offering four-minute opening statements, four-minute rebuttals, and two-minute closing statements. Each side got 15 minutes to prepare once the topic was chosen. In one contest before a live audience, Project Debater went against 2016 World Universities Debating Championship grand finalist Harish Natarajan on the motion that the government should subsidize preschool. The YouTube video and transcript of the debate show Project Debater fluently marshaling an impressive amount of research data in support of that proposition. Natarajan largely counters with principled arguments, calling attention to opportunity costs (paying for this good thing means not paying for that other, perhaps better thing) and arguing that politics inevitably will target subsidies to favored groups. That contrast is not surprising, since Project Debater had access to millions of articles during her 15 minutes of preparation, while Natarajan had to rely more on general principles. Slonim and his colleagues report that expert analysts, who read transcripts without knowing which side was human, thought that Project Debater gave a "decent performance" but that the human debaters generally were more persuasive.