Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [106]
Jennings and Rutter both responded correctly: “What is Chicago?” (The bigger airport took its name from Butch O’Hare, a fighter pilot; the smaller one from the Battle of Midway.) Jennings doubled his meager winnings, to $4,400. Rutter added $5,000 to his, reaching $10,400. When Watson missed the clue, the gap promised to narrow. Its response, which drew laughter from the crowd, was: “What is Toronto??????” (The IBM team had programmed the machine to add those question marks on wild guesses so that the spectators would see that the computer had low confidence. Its awareness of what it didn’t know was an important aspect of its intelligence.) Fortunately for Watson, it had wagered a mere $947 on its answer. It had established a big lead and was programmed to hold on to it. Even after the airport flub, it headed into the second and deciding game with a $25,000 advantage over Rutter and a bit more than $30,000 ahead of Jennings.
In the break between the two games, the crowd emptied into the lobby for refreshments. IBM’s Sam Palmisano greeted Charles Lickel, the recently retired manager whose visit to a Fishkill restaurant at the height of Ken Jennings’s winning streak led to the idea for the Jeopardy challenge. Palmisano was thrilled with Watson’s performance. But was it too much of a good thing? Would Watson come off as a bully or make the show boring? “Maybe we should have dialed it down a little,” he said to Lickel.
Nearby, Ferrucci was huddled with John Kelly, the director of IBM Research. He was explaining to Kelly how the machine could possibly have picked Toronto as a U.S. city with World War II–themed airports. He noted that Watson had very low confidence in Toronto and that its second choice, just a hair behind, was Chicago. Watson, he said, was programmed not to discount answers based on one apparent contradiction. After all, there could be towns named Toronto in the United States. And from Watson’s perspective, Toronto, Ontario, had numerous U.S. connections. For instance, its baseball team, the Blue Jays, was in the American League.
As the second and final game began, Trebek, who was born in Canada, had a little fun at Watson’s expense. The three things he had learned in the previous match, he said, were that Watson was fast and capable of some weird wagers—and that “Toronto is now a U.S. city!”
The challenge for Jennings and Rutter was clear. To catch up with Watson, one of them had to rack up earnings quickly and then land on two or three Daily Doubles, betting the farm each time. That was the only way to reach sky-high scores in the remaining game. To catch Watson, one of them would probably need to reach $50,000, or even higher.
Watson promptly took off on a Daily Double hunt. It answered clues about Istanbul and the European Parliament, and identified Arabic as the mother tongue of Maltese. But it lost $1,000 by naming Serbia, instead of Slovenia, as the one former Yugoslav republic in the European Union.
It was then that Rutter and Jennings happened on a weak category for Watson: Actors Who Direct. The clues were simply the names of movies, such as A Bronx Tale or Into the Wild. The contestants had to come up with the directors’ names—Robert De Niro and Sean Penn, in those examples. Watson was slow to the buzzer in this category because the clues were so short. It took Trebek only a second or so to read them, and Watson required at least two seconds to find the answer. Jennings worked