Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [1]
A person looking at Watson’s frantic and repetitive labors might conclude that the player was unsure of itself, laughably short on common sense, and scandalously wasteful of computing resources. This was all true. Watson barked up every tree from every conceivable angle. The pattern on its screen during this process, circles exploding into little stars, provided only a hint of the industrial-scale computing at work. In a room behind the podium, visible through a horizontal window, Watson’s computers churned, and the fans cooling them roared. This time, its three seconds of exertion paid off. Watson came up with a response, sending a signal to a mechanical device on the podium. It was the size of a large aspirin bottle with a clear plastic covering. Inside was a Jeopardy buzzer. About one one-hundredth of a second later, a metal finger inside this contraption shot downward, pressing the button.
Justin Bernbach, a thirty-eight-year-old airline lobbyist from Brooklyn, stood to Watson’s left. He had pocketed $155,000 while winning seven straight Jeopardy matches in 2009. Unlike Watson, Bernbach understood the sentence. He knew precisely who Moshe Dayan was as soon as he saw the clue, and he carried an image of the Israeli leader in his mind. He gripped the buzzer in his fist and frantically pressed it four or five times as the light came on.
But Watson had arrived first.
“Watson?” said Crain.
The computer’s amiable male voice arranged the answer, as Jeopardy demands, in the form of a question: “What is eye patch?”
“Very good,” Crain said. “An eye patch on his left eye. Choose again, Watson.”
Bernbach slumped at his podium. This match with the machine wasn’t going well.
It was going magnificently for David Ferrucci. As the chief scientist of the team developing the Jeopardy computer, Ferrucci was feeling vindicated. Only three years earlier, the suggestion that a computer might match wits and word skills with human champions in Jeopardy sparked opposition bordering on ridicule in the halls of IBM Research. And the final goal of the venture, a nationally televised match against two Jeopardy legends, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, seemed risky to some, a bit déclassé to others. Jeopardy, a television show, appeared to lack the timeless cachet of chess, which IBM computers had mastered a decade earlier.
Nonetheless, Ferrucci and his team went ahead and built their machine. Months earlier, it had fared well in a set of test matches. But the games revealed flaws in the machine’s logic and game strategy. It was a good player, but to beat Jennings and Rutter, who would be jousting for a million-dollar top prize, it would have to be great. So they had worked long hours over the summer to revamp Watson. This September event was the coming-out party for Watson 2.0. It was the first of fifty-six test matches against a higher level of competitor: people, like Justin Bernbach, who had won enough matches to compete in Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions.
In these early matches, Watson was having its way with them. Ferrucci, monitoring the matches from a crowded observation booth, was all smiles. Keen to promote its Jeopardy phenom, IBM’s advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, had hired a film crew to follow Ferrucci’s team and capture the drama of this opening round of championship matches. The observation room was packed with cameras. Microphones on long booms recorded the back-and-forth of engineers as they discussed algorithms and Watson’s response time, known as latency. Ferrucci, wearing a mike on his lapel, gave a blow-by-blow commentary as Watson, on the other side of the glass, strutted its new and smarter self.
It was almost as if Watson, like a person giddy with hubris, was primed for a fall. The computer certainly had its weaknesses. Even when functioning smoothly,