Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [101]
This irritated the testy Ferrucci and, to his relief, knocked him out of his fragile mood. He joined his team for a last lunch, all of them seated at a long table in the cafeteria. As they were finishing, just a few minutes before 1 P.M., a roaring engine interrupted their conversations. It was IBM’s chairman, Sam Palmisano, landing in his helicopter. The hour had come. Ferrucci walked down the sunlit corridor to the auditorium.
Ken Jennings woke up that Friday morning in the Crown Plaza Hotel in White Plains. He’d slept well, much better than he usually did before big Jeopardy matches. He had good reason to feel confident. He had destroyed Watson in one of the practice rounds. Afterward, he said, Watson’s developers told him that the game had featured a couple of “train wrecks”—categories in which Watson appeared disoriented. Children’s Literature was one. For Jennings, train wrecks signaled the machine’s vulnerability. With a few of them in the big match, he could stand up tall for humans and perhaps extend his legend from Jeopardy to the broader realm of knowledge. “Given the right board,” he said, “Watson is beatable.” The stakes were considerable. While IBM would give all of Watson’s winnings to charity, a human winner would earn a half-million-dollar prize, with another half-million to give to the charity of his choice. Finishing in second and third place was worth $150,000 and $100,000, with equal amounts for the players’ charities.
A little after eleven, a car service stopped by the hotel, picked up Jennings and his wife, Mindy, and drove them to IBM’s Yorktown laboratory. Jennings carried three changes of clothes so that he could dress differently for each session, simulating three different days. As soon as he stepped out of the car, Jeopardy officials whisked him past the crush of people in the lobby toward the staircase. Jeopardy had cleared out a few offices in IBM’s Human Resources Department, and Jennings was given one as a dressing room.
On short visits to the East Coast, Brad Rutter liked to sleep late in order to stay in sync with West Coast time. But the morning of the match, he found himself awake at seven, which meant he faced four and a half hours before the car came for him. Rutter was at the Ritz-Carlton in White Plains, about a half mile from Jennings. He ate breakfast, showered, and then killed time until 11:30. Unlike Jennings, Rutter had grounds for serious concern. In the practice rounds, he had been uncharacteristically slow. The computer had exquisite timing, and Jennings seemed to hold his own. Rutter, who had never lost a game of Jeopardy, was facing a flameout unless he could get to the buzzer faster.
Shortly after Rutter arrived at IBM, he and Jennings played one last practice round with Watson. To Rutter’s delight, his buzzer thumb started to regain its old magic, and he beat both Jennings and the machine. Now, in the three practice matches, each of the players had registered a win. But Jennings and Rutter noticed something strange about Watson. Its game strategy, Jennings said, “seemed naive.” Just like beginning Jeopardy players, Watson started with the easy, low-dollar clues and moved straight down the board. Why wasn’t it hunting for Daily Doubles? In the Blu-ray Discs given to them in November, Jennings and Rutter had seen that Watson skipped around the high-dollar clues, hunting for the single Daily Double on the first Jeopardy board and the two in Double Jeopardy. Landing on Daily Doubles was vital. It gave a player the means to build a big lead. And once the Daily Doubles were off the board, the leader was hard to catch. But in the practice rounds, Watson didn’t appear to be following this strategy.
The two players were