Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [105]
In the first minutes of the game, Watson ransacked the board for Daily Doubles. This led it through the high-dollar clues on everything from Sergei Rachmaninoff and Franz Liszt to leprosy and albinism. The frustrated humans kept trying to buzz, to no effect. The computer nearly tripled Rutter’s score, to $14,600, and then, under Cambridge, landed on the board’s first Daily Double. “I’ll wager six thousand four hundred thirty-five dollars,” Watson said. This figure, so unusually precise, drew laughter from the crowd. Like everything else on the board, the clue turned out to be friendly to Watson. “The chapels at Pembroke and Emmanuel Colleges were designed by this architect.” Watson could have handled this one in its infancy. The clue featured simple syntax and a crystal-clear LAT—an architect—connected to easily searchable proper nouns. By answering “Who is Sir Christopher Wren?” Watson raised its winnings to $21,035.
Two questions later, a clue appeared in the wrong box. These glitches, which would continue through the afternoon, made life even harder for Jennings and Rutter. They had to stand at the podiums with their backs turned to the Jeopardy board so that they wouldn’t see a clue if one happened to pop up. These delays often lasted for five or ten minutes at a time. While the contestants stood there, attendants mopping their foreheads or offering them water, Trebek worked to keep the audience engaged. He told jokes and answered questions about Jeopardy. He mentioned, for example, that Merv Griffin, the game’s founder, raked in an astounding $83 million during his lifetime for rights to his Jeopardy jingle. One time, as technicians labored behind him, Trebek intoned: “We realize that if we keep you waiting here three hours on the tarmac, we have to provide you with a meal, and perhaps accommodation.”
The malfunction during Watson’s runaway game arrived at a strange moment. Watson had chosen the $1,600 clue under Hedgehog Podge. The clue seemed almost designed for the computer: “Garry Kasparov wrote the foreword for The Complete Hedgehog, about a defense in this game.” Watson, as usual, won the buzz. Its answer panel showed 96 percent confidence in its first response: “What is chess?” It was Watson’s digital role model, Deep Blue, that had beaten Kasparov in the famous man-machine match in 1997. Yet as Trebek waited for a response, saying, “Watson?” the computer said nothing. After its time ran out, Jennings scored on the rebound. “Chess is right,” Trebek said. “And I think Deep Blue will never forgive Watson for missing that one.”
It turned out, though, that when the clue had popped up in the wrong box on the board, it disoriented the machine, leading Watson to keep mum. Eventually, Jeopardy had to replace that clue with another one—much to the IBM crowd’s regret. It would have been nice, after all, to have a reference to Deep Blue in the match. But in an afternoon full of technical mishaps, the chess clue fell out. “There’s a line Watson’s familiar with,” Trebek told the audience off camera. He made a sweeping gesture with his arm and said, “_____ happens.”
As this second half of the first game neared its end, Watson continued its rampage, ending with $36,681. Rutter and Jennings had barely inched ahead, to $5,400 and $2,200, respectively. Their best hope was that the machine, known to be weaker in Final Jeopardy, would bet heavily—looking for a knockout punch—and miss. The category was U.S. Cities. The clue: “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero, its second largest for a World War II battle.”
To many, this sounded like an easy one for Watson. It was a city big enough to have two airports, each of them connected thematically