Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [103]
With control of the board, Watson pursued the merciless strategy mapped out by David Gondek and his team. Departing from its passive approach in the practice rounds, it moved straight to the high-dollar boxes, hunting for the Daily Double. “Let’s try Literary Character APB for eight hundred,” Watson said. The zinging sound of space guns echoed through the auditorium, announcing that the machine, on its first try, had landed on the Daily Double. The two APPLAUSE signs flashed over the stage, but they were hardly needed. This was Watson’s crowd.
In truth, the Daily Double in the first round of Jeopardy is not terribly important, especially this early in the game. The players at this stage have very little money to bet. It’s in Double Jeopardy, when the end is in sight and the contestants have piled up much higher winnings, that a laggard can vault toward victory, winning $10,000 or even more with a single bet. Watson’s Daily Double strategy was less about padding its own lead than keeping these dangerous wild cards from its rivals.
Though Watson had won only $400, Jeopardy rules allow players to bet the maximum dollar number on the board, or $1,000. This would risk dropping Watson’s score into negative territory. But before the machine could place its bet, Alex Trebek stopped the game. His monitor had blacked out. Technicians scurried across the black stage as Jennings slumped at his lectern. Rutter, his feet crossed at the ankles, drummed his fingers. Between them, the computer’s avatar traced its endless lines of blue and red, behaving much like its close cousin, the screen-saver. When it came to patience, Watson was in a league of its own.
“Ready to go,” said a voice from the control booth. “Five, four, three, two, one.” The crowd again heard the recording of Watson calling for the $800 clue, the sound of zinging space guns, and the applause. Then Trebek cut in live—an art he had perfected in his twenty-seven years on the show—asking Watson how much it wanted to bet. “One thousand, please,” the computer said. Then it faced this clue: “Wanted for killing Sir Danvers Carew, appearance pale and dwarfish, seems to have a split personality.”
Watson didn’t hesitate. “Who is Hyde?”
“Hyde, yes,” Trebek said. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The crowd applauded. Jennings and Rutter politely joined in. This was the custom in Jeopardy, though such sportsmanship seemed a bit odd when standing next to a machine.
Watson didn’t stop there. Beating Jennings and Rutter to the buzz, it answered clues about the Beatles’ Jude, the swimmer Michael Phelps, the monster Grendel in Beowulf, the 1908 London Olympics, the boundaries of black holes (event horizons), Lady Madonna, and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. By the time Rutter jumped in on a clue about the Harry Potter books (“What is Voldemort?”), Watson had $5,200, far ahead of Rutter’s $1,000. Jennings trailed with only $200.
It was time for a commercial break. Off camera, Trebek shook his head as he walked across the set toward Jennings and Rutter. “I can’t help but wonder if Watson was sandbagging yesterday,” he said. Was the computer, like a poker player holding a royal flush, masking its strength? Rutter didn’t know, but he noticed that Watson’s strategy had changed. “He wasn’t jumping around the way he is today,” he said.
“He’s a hustler,” Jennings said.
In fact, before the match technicians had switched Watson to its “championship” mode. This involved two changes. First, this exhibition match was a double game. The player with the highest cumulative score in the two games would win. This changed the players’ strategy. Instead of following the safest path to win each game, if only by a single dollar, players had to pile up winnings. In addition to adjusting Watson’s betting algorithms for double games, the IBM team directed the machine to hunt for Daily Doubles. The