Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [11]
So in mid-2005 Horn took up the challenge with a number of his top researchers, including Ferrucci. A twelve-year veteran at the company, Ferrucci managed a handful of research teams, including the five people who were teaching machines to answer simple questions in English. Their discipline was called question-answering. Ferrucci knew the challenges all too well. The machines stumbled in understanding English and appeared to plateau, in competitions sponsored by the U.S. government, at a success rate of about 35 percent.
Ferrucci wasn’t a big Jeopardy fan, but he was familiar with it enough to appreciate the obstacles involved. Jeopardy tested a combination of knowledge, speed, and accuracy, along with game strategy. The show featured three contestants, each with a buzzer. In the course of about twenty minutes, they raced to respond to sixty clues representing a combined value of $54,000. Each one—and this was a Jeopardy quirk—was in fact an answer, some far more complex than others. The contestant had to provide the missing question. For example, in an unusual Tournament of Champions game that aired in November 1994, contestants were presented with this $500 clue1 under the category Furniture: “French term for a what-not, a stand of tiered shelves with slender supports used to display curios.” The host, Alex Trebek, read the clue from the big game board. The moment he finished, a panel around the question lit up setting off the race to buzz. On average, contestants had about four seconds to read and consider the clue before buzzing. The first to buzz was, in effect, placing a bet. The right response—“What is an étagère?”—was worth $500 and gave the contestant the chance to pick again. (“Let’s try European Capitals for $200.”) A botched response wiped the same amount from a contestant’s score and gave the other two a chance to try. (In this example, no one dared to buzz. Such a clue, uncommon in Jeopardy, is known as a “triple-stumper.”)
To compete in Jeopardy, a machine not only would need to come up with the answer, posed as a question, within four seconds, but it would also have to gauge its confidence in its response. It would have to know what it knew. “Humans know what they know like that,” Ferrucci said later, snapping his fingers. Replicating such confidence in a computer would be tricky. What’s more, the computer would have to calculate the risk according to where it stood in the game. If it was far ahead and had only middling confidence on “étagère,” it might make more sense not to buzz. In addition to piling up knowledge, a computer would have to learn to play the game.
Complicating the game strategy were four wild cards. Three of the game’s sixty hidden clues were so-called Daily Doubles. In that 1994 game, a contestant named Rachael Schwartz, an attorney from Bedminster, New Jersey, asked for the $400 clue in the Furniture category. Up popped a Daily Double giving her the chance to bet some or all of her money on a furniture-related clue she had yet to see. She wagered $500, a third of her winnings, and was faced with this clue: “This store fixture began in 15th century Europe as a table whose top was marked for measuring.” She missed it, guessing, “What is a cutting table?,” and lost $500. (“What is a counter?” was the correct response.) It was early in the game and didn’t have much impact. The three players were all around the $1,000 mark. But later in a game, Ferrucci saw, Daily Doubles gave contestants the means to storm back from far behind. A computer playing the game would require a clever game program to calibrate its bets.
The biggest of the wild cards was Final Jeopardy, the last clue of the game. As in Daily Doubles, contestants could bet all or part of their winnings on a single category. But all three contestants participated—as long as they had positive earnings. Often the game boiled down to betting strategies in Final Jeopardy. Take that 1994 contest, in