Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [17]
Forget inspiration, creativity, or blinding insight. Deep Blue crunched data and won its match by juggling statistics, testing thousands of scenarios, and calculating the odds. Its intelligence was alien to human beings—if it could be considered intelligence at all. IBM at the time described the machine as “less intelligent than the stupidest person.” In fact, the company stressed that Deep Blue did not represent AI, since it didn’t mimic human thinking. But the Deep Blue team made good on a decades-old promise. They taught a machine to win a game that was considered uniquely human. In this, they passed a chess version of the so-called Turing test, an intelligence exam for machines devised by Alan Turing, a pioneer in the field. If a human judge, Turing wrote, were to communicate with both a smart machine and another human, and that judge could not tell one from the other, the machine passed the test. In the limited realm of chess, Deep Blue aced the Turing test—even without engaging in what most of us would recognize as thought.
But knowledge? That was another challenge altogether. Chess was esoteric. Only a handful of specially endowed people had mastered the game. Yet all of us played the knowledge game. By advancing from chess to Jeopardy, IBM was shifting the focus from a remote island off the coast straight to our cognitive mainland. Here, the computer would grapple with far more than game theory and math. It would be competing in a field utterly defined by human intelligence. The competitors in Jeopardy, as well as the other humans writing the clues, would feast on knowledge tied to experiences and sensations, sights and tastes. The machine, by contrast, would be blind and deaf, with no body, no experience, no life. Its only memories—if you could call them that—would be millions of lists and documents encoded in ones and zeros. And the entire game would be played in endlessly complex and nuanced language—a cinch for humans, a tribulation for machines.
Picture one of those cartoons in which a land animal, perhaps a coyote, runs off a cliff and continues to run so fast in midair that it manages to fly (at least for a while). Now imagine that animal not only surviving but flying upward and competing with birds. That would be the challenge facing an IBM machine. It would have to use its native strengths in speed and computation to thrive in an utterly foreign setting. Strictly speaking, the machine would be engaged in a knowledge game without “knowing” a thing.
Still, Ferrucci believed his team had a fighting chance, though he wasn’t quite ready to commit. He code-named the project Blue J—Blue for Big Blue, J for Jeopardy—and right before the holidays, in late 2006, he asked Horn to give him six months to see if it was possible.
2. And Representing the Humans . . .
ON A LATE SUMMER day in 2004, a twenty-nine-year-old software engineer named Ken Jennings placed a mammoth $12,000 bet on a Daily Double in Jeopardy. The category was Literary Pairs. Jennings, who by that point had won a record fifty straight games, was initially flummoxed by the clue: “The film title ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ comes from a poem about these ill-fated medieval lovers.” As the seconds passed, Jennings flipped through every literary medieval couple he could conjure up—Romeo and Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura—but he found reasons to disqualify each one. Time was running out. A difference of $24,000 was at stake, enough for