Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [0]
Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
Stephen Baker
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
BOOKS BY STEPHEN BAKER
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
1. The Germ of the Jeopardy Machine
2. And Representing the Humans . . .
3. Blue J Is Born
4. Educating Blue J
5. Watson’s Face
6. Watson Takes On Humans
7. AI
8. A Season of Jitters
9. Watson Looks for Work
10. How to Play the Game
11. The Match
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources and Further Reading
About the Author
Footnotes
BOOKS BY STEPHEN BAKER
The Numerati
Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Baker
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in the United States of America
000 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Sally and Jack, my fact-hungry sister and son, who each introduced me to Jeopardy! at a different stage of my life
Contents
Introduction
1. The Germ of the Jeopardy Machine
2. And Representing the Humans . . .
3. Blue J Is Born
4. Educating Blue J
5. Watson’s Face
6. Watson Takes On Humans
7. AI
8. A Season of Jitters
9. Watson Looks for Work
10. How to Play the Game
11. The Match
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources and Further Reading
About the Author
Introduction
Watson paused. The closest thing it had to a face, a glowing orb on a flat-panel screen, turned from forest green to a dark shade of blue. Filaments of yellow and red streamed steadily across it, like the paths of jets circumnavigating the globe. This pattern represented a state of quiet anticipation as the supercomputer awaited the next clue. It was a September morning in 2010 at IBM Research, in the hills north of New York City, and the computer, known as Watson, was annihilating two humans, both champion players, in practice rounds of Jeopardy! Within months, it would be playing the game on national television in a million-dollar man vs. machine match against two of Jeopardy’s all-time greats.
As Todd Crain, an actor and the host of these test games, started to read the next clue, the filaments on Watson’s display began to jag and tremble. Watson was thinking—or coming as close to it as a computer could. The $1,600 clue, in the category The Eyes Have It, read: “This facial ware made Israel’s Moshe Dayan instantly recognizable worldwide.”
The three players—two human and one electronic—could read the words as soon as they appeared on the big Jeopardy board. But they had to wait for Crain to read the entire clue before buzzing. That was the rule. As the host pronounced the last word, a light would signal that contestants could buzz. The first to hit the button could win $1,600 with the right answer—or lose the same amount with a wrong one. (In these test matches, they played with funny money.)
This pause for reading gave Watson three or four seconds to hunt down the answer. The first step was to figure out what the clue meant. One of its programs promptly picked apart the grammar of the sentence, identifying the verbs, objects, and key words. In another section, research focused on Moshe Dayan. Was this a person? A place in Israel? Perhaps a holy site? Names like John and Maria would signal a person. But Moshe was more puzzling.
During these seconds, Watson’s cognitive apparatus— 2,208 computer processors working in concert—mounted a massive research operation through thousands of documents around Moshe Dayan and his signature facial ware. After a second or so, different programs, or algorithms, began to suggest hundreds of possible answers. To us, many of them would look like wild guesses. Some were phrases that Dayan had uttered, others were references to his military campaigns and facts about Israel. Still others cited various articles of his clothing. At this point, the computer launched