Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [108]
The audience filed out of the auditorium. Nighttime had fallen. The lobby, its massive Saarinen windows looking out on snow-blanketed fields, was now decked out for a feast. Waiters circulated with beer and wine, shrimp cocktails, miniature enchiladas, and tiny stalks of asparagus wrapped in steak. The home team had won and the celebration was on, with one caveat: Everyone in the festive crowd was sworn to secrecy until the televised match a month later.
Two days later, Alex Trebek was back home in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. He was unhappy about the exhibition match. His chief complaint was that IBM had unveiled one version of Watson for the practice rounds and then tweaked its strategy for the match. “I think that was wrong of IBM,” he said. “It really pissed me off.” For Trebek, the change was tantamount to upping a car’s octane before a NASCAR race. “IBM didn’t need to do that,” he said. “They probably would have won anyway. But they were scared.” He added that after the match was over, “I felt bad for the guys, because I felt they had been jobbed just a little.” Jennings, while disappointed, said he also had masked certain aspects of his strategy during the practice games and didn’t see why Watson couldn’t do the same. Rutter said that “some gamesmanship was going on. But there’s nothing illegal about that.”
Ferrucci, for his part, said that during practice sessions his team was focused on the technical details of Watson’s operations, making sure, for example, that it was getting the electronic feed after each clue of the correct response. Jennings and Rutter, he said, had already seen Watson hunting for Daily Doubles in the videos of the sparring rounds that they’d received months earlier. “Every respectable Jeopardy player knows how to hunt for them,” he added. Was Watson supposed to play dumb?
Fourteen years earlier, Garry Kasparov had registered a complaint similar to Trebek’s after succumbing to Deep Blue in his epic chess match. He objected to the adjustments that the IBM engineers had made to the program in response to what they were learning about his style of play. These disagreements were rooted in questions about the role of human beings in man-machine matches. It was clear that Watson and Deep Blue were on their own as they played. But did they also need to map out their own game strategies? Was that part of the Grand Challenge? IBM in both cases would say no. Jennings and Rutter, on that Friday afternoon in Yorktown Heights, were in fact playing against an entire team of IBM researchers, and the collective intelligence of those twenty-five Ph.D.s was represented on the stage by a machine.
In that sense, it almost seemed unfair. It certainly did to Trebek, who also complained about Watson’s blazing speed and precision on the buzzer. But consider the history. Only three years earlier, Blue J—as Watson was then known—fared worse on Jeopardy clues than an average twelve-year-old. And no one back then would have thought to complain about its buzzer reflexes, not when the machine struggled for nearly two hours to respond to a single clue. Since then, the engineers had led their computer up a spectacular learning curve—to the point where the former dullard now appeared to have an unfair advantage.
And yet Watson, for all its virtues, was still flawed. Its victory was no sure bet. Through the fall, it lost nearly one of three matches to players a notch or two below Jennings and Rutter. A couple of train wreck categories in the final game could have spelled defeat. Even late in the second game, Jennings could have stormed back. If he had won that last Daily Double, Trebek said, “he could have put significant pressure on Watson.” After the match, Jennings and Rutter stressed that the computer still had cognitive catching up to do. They both agreed that if Jeopardy had been a written