Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [25]
Two things, according to his competitors, distinguished Jennings. First, he had an uncanny feel for the buzzer. This wasn’t a mechanical ability but a uniquely human one. Sitting at the production table by the Jeopardy set, a game official waited for Trebek to finish reading the clue, then turned on the panel of lights on the big Jeopardy board. This signaled the opportunity to buzz. Players who buzzed too early got penalized: Their buzzers were locked out for a crucial quarter of a second, opening the door for others to buzz in. Jennings, said his competitors, had an almost magical feel for the rhythm of the buzzmeister. He anticipated the moment almost the way jazz musicians sense a downbeat. “Ken knew the buzzer,” said Deirdre Basile, one of his early victims. “He had that down to a science.”
His second attribute was a preternatural calm under pressure. Like other players, Jennings had a clear sense of what he knew. (This is known as “metacognition.”) But knowing a fact is one thing, locating it quite another. People routinely botch the retrieval process, sometimes hunting for the name of a person standing right in front of them. This problem, known as “tip of the tongue syndrome,” occurs more often when people are stressed—such as when they have less than four seconds to come up with an answer, thousands of dollars are at stake, and they’re standing in front of a television audience of millions.
Bennett L. Schwartz, a psychologist at Florida International University, has studied the effects of emotion on tip of the tongue syndrome. He came up with questions designed to make people anxious, such as, “What was the name of the tool that executed people in the French Revolution?” With beheadings on their mind, he found, people were more likely to freeze up on the answer. Memory works on clues—words, images, or ideas that lead to the area where the potential answer resides. People suffering from tip of the tongue syndrome struggle to find those clues. For some people, Schwartz said, the concern that they might experience difficulty becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I know the answer and I can’t retrieve it,” he said. “That’s a conflict.” And the brain appears to busy itself with this internal dispute instead of systematically trawling for the most promising clues and pathways. Researchers at Harvard, studying the brain scans of people suffering from tip of the tongue syndrome, have noted increased activity in the anterior cingulate—a part of the brain behind the frontal lobe, devoted to conflict resolution and detecting surprise.
Few of these conflicts appeared to interfere with Jennings’s information retrieval. During his unprecedented seventy-four-game streak, he routinely won the buzz on more than half the clues. And his snap judgments that the answers were on call in his head somewhere led him to a remarkable 92 percent precision rate, according to statistics compiled by the quiz show’s fans. This topped the average champion by 10 percent.
As IBM’s scientists contemplated building a machine that could compete with the likes of Ken Jennings, they understood their constraints. Their computer, for all its power and speed, would be a first cousin of the laptops they carried around the Hawthorne lab. That was the technology at hand for a challenge in 2011. No neocortex, no neurons, no anterior cingulate, just a mountain of transistors etched into silicon processing ones and zeros. Any Jeopardy machine they built would struggle mightily to master language and common sense—areas that come as naturally to humans as breathing. Their machine would be an outsider. On occasion it would be clueless, even laughable. On the positive side, it wouldn’t suffer from nerves. On certain clues it would surely piece together its statistical analysis and summon the most obscure answers with sufficient speed to match that of Ken Jennings. But could they ensure enough of these successes to win?
Ken Jennings’s remarkable streak came to an end in a game televised in November 2004. Following a rare lackluster