Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [104]
And it did. As the opening game progressed, Watson faltered. In the Final Frontiers category, it buzzed confidently on a Latin term for end, “a place where trains can also originate.” But the machine picked the wrong Latin word: “What is finis?” Jennings got “terminus” on the rebound, and inched closer.
Then Watson fell into a couple of cognitive traps. The $1,000 clue under Olympic Oddities asked about “the anatomical oddity of U.S. gymnast George Eyser, who won a gold medal on the parallel bars in 1904.” Jennings won the buzz and after a pause ventured: “What is . . . he was missing a hand?” That was incorrect. Watson buzzed on the rebound.
“What is leg?” it said.
“Yes,” Trebek said. But before they moved to the next clue, a judge called a halt to the game. Eyser’s “leg” wasn’t the anatomical oddity. Instead, it was the fact that he was missing a leg. After five minutes of consultation onstage with the judges, Trebek, and IBM’s David Shepler—Watson’s advocate—the computer’s response was ruled incorrect. “It was my boo-boo,” Trebek told the audience. Then he redubbed his response to Watson: “No, I’m sorry I can’t accept that. I needed you to say, “What is ‘He’s missing a leg’?”
Watson’s mistake, though subtle, reflected its misreading of the lexical answer type (LAT) in the clue. Despite years of training from James Fan and others, in this example it failed to understand precisely what it was seeking. For a national audience initially wowed by the Jeopardy computer, it would serve as a reminder that the machine, for all its prodigious powers, could succumb to confusion. For Jennings and Rutter, the upshot was simpler. It chopped $2,000 from Watson’s lead.
This was a misstep for Watson but hardly an embarrassment. That would come later, on a $1,000 clue asking about the decade that gave birth to Oreo cookies and the first modern crossword puzzle. Jennings won the buzz and answered, “What are the twenties?’ This was wrong. The deaf Watson won the rebound and promptly repeated the same wrong answer. The machine, for all its brilliance, was in many aspects oblivious. This was no secret in IBM’s War Room, but now the whole world could see it.
As this first Jeopardy round came to a close, Rutter climbed and Watson tumbled. They ended in a tie, the co-leaders at $5,000, with Jennings at $2,000. That would end the first of the three-day television event in February, meaning that viewers would tune in for Day Two fully expecting to see a Double Jeopardy round featuring men and machine in a tense, closely fought tussle.
Watson, it turned out, had other ideas. After an intermission, in which the host and the human contestants changed clothes, Trebek unveiled the categories for Double Jeopardy. This round, which offered more background information on Watson, would occupy the second of the half-hour television shows. The names on the board gave Jennings and Rutter room for hope. A couple of them, Hedgehog Podge and Etude Brute, sounded confusing—potential Watson train wrecks. The others—Don’t Worry About It, The Art of the Steal, Cambridge, and Church & State—looked more straightforward. But they wouldn’t know for sure until they started to play.
It didn’t take long to see that Watson was in a groove. The machine monopolized the buzzer, hunted down the Daily Doubles, and appeared to understand every clue. Jennings, whose lectern was right next to Watson’s bionic hand, later said that its staccato rhythm as it pressed the buzzer three times reminded him of “the soundtrack from The Terminator.” Rutter said that playing against Watson filled him with a new type of empathy. “I thought, ‘This must be what it feels like to play against Ken or me,’” he said.
Watson’s buzzer speed also affected the humans’ game. They felt compelled to jump faster than usual