Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [2]
It was after lunch that things deteriorated. Bernbach, so frustrated in the morning, started to beat Watson to the buzzer. Meanwhile, the computer was making risky bets and flubbing entire categories of clues. Defeat, which had seemed so remote in the morning, was now just one lost bet away. It came in the fourth match. Watson was winning by $4,000 when it stumbled on this Final Jeopardy clue: “On Feb. 8, 2010, the headline in a major newspaper in this city read: ‘Amen! After 43 years, our prayers are answered.’” Watson missed the reference to the previous day’s Super Bowl, won by the New Orleans Saints. It bet $23,000 on Chicago. Bernbach also botched the clue, guessing New York. But he bet less than Watson, which made him the first person to defeat the revamped machine. He pumped his fist.
In the sixth and last match of the day, Watson trailed Bernbach, $16,200 to $21,000. The computer landed on a Daily Double in the category Colleges and Universities, which meant it could bet everything it had on nailing the clue. A $5,000 bet would have brought it into a tie with Bernbach. A larger bet, while risky, could have catapulted the computer toward victory. “I’ll take five,” Watson said.
Five. Not $5,000, not $500. Five measly dollars of funny money. The engineers in the observation booth were stunned. But they kept quieter than usual; the cameras were rolling.
Then Watson crashed. It occurred at some point between placing that lowly bet and attempting to answer a clue about the first Catholic college in Washington, D.C. Watson’s “front end,” its voice and avatar, was waiting for its thousands of processors, or “back end,” to deliver an answer. It received nothing. Anticipating such a situation, the engineers had prepared set phrases. “Sorry,” Watson said, reciting one of them, “I’m stumped.” Its avatar displayed a dark blue circle with a single filament orbiting mournfully in the Antarctic latitudes.
What to do? Everyone had ideas. Maybe they should finish the game with an older version of Watson. Or perhaps they could hook it up to another up-to-date version of the program at the company’s Hawthorne labs, six miles down the road. But some worried that a remote connection would slow Watson’s response time, causing it to lose more often on the buzz. In the end, as often happens with computers, a reboot brought the hulking Jeopardy machine back to life. But Ferrucci and his team got an all-too-vivid reminder that their Jeopardy player, even as it prepared for a debut on national television, could go haywire or shut down at any moment. When Watson was lifted to the podium, facing banks of cameras and lights, it was anybody’s guess how it would perform. Watson, it was clear, had a frighteningly broad repertoire.
Only four years earlier, in 2006, Watson was a prohibitive long shot, not just to win at Jeopardy but even to be built. For more than a year, the head of IBM Research, a physicist named Paul Horn, had been pressing a number of teams at the company to pursue a Jeopardy machine. The way he saw it, IBM had triumphed in 1997 with its chess challenge. The company’s machine, Deep Blue, had defeated the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov. This burnished IBM’s reputation among the global computing elite while demonstrating to the world that computers could rival human beings in certain domains associated with intelligence.
That triumph left IBM’s top executives hungry for an encore. Horn felt the pressure. But what could the researchers