Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [26]
The Jeopardy jingle came on, and Jennings put his brain into drive. But the answer, he said, just wasn’t there. He didn’t read the business pages of newspapers. Companies were one of his few weak spots. He guessed, “What is FedEx?” When Zerg responded correctly, “What is H&R Block?” Jennings knew his reign was over. During his streak, he had amassed more than $2.5 million in earnings and became perhaps the first national brand for general braininess since the disgraced Charles Van Doren.
Harry Friedman, of course, was far too smart a producer to let such an asset walk away. A year later, he featured Jennings in a wildly promoted Ultimate Tour of Champions. This eventually brought Jennings into a threesome featuring the two leading money winners from before 2003, when winners were limited to five matches. Both Jerome Vered and Brad Rutter had retired as undefeated champions under the rules at the time. Rutter, who had dropped out of Johns Hopkins University and worked for a time at a music store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had never lost a Jeopardy match.
In the 2005 showdown, Rutter handled both Jennings and Vered with relative ease. He was so fast to the buzzer, Jennings later said, that sometimes the light to open the buzzing didn’t appear to turn on. “It was off before it was on,” he said. “I don’t know if the filaments got warmed up.” In the three days of competition, Rutter piled up 62,000, compared to 34,599 for Jennings and 20,600 for Vered. (These weren’t dollars but points, since they were playing for a far larger purse.) Rutter won another $2 million, catapulting him past Jennings as the biggest money winner in Jeopardy history.
These two, Rutter and Jennings, were the natural competitors for an IBM machine. To establish itself as the Jeopardy king, the computer had to vanquish the best. These two players fit the bill. And they promised to be formidable opponents. They had human qualities a Jeopardy computer could never approach: fluency in language, an intuitive feel for hints and suggestion, and a mastery of ideas and concepts. Beyond that, they appeared to boast computer-like qualities: vast memories, fast processors, and nerves of steel. No tip-of-the-tongue glitches for Jennings or Rutter. But would a much-ballyhooed match against a machine awaken their human failings? Ferrucci and his team could always hope.
3. Blue J Is Born
IN THOSE EARLY DAYS of 2007, when Blue J was no more than a conditional promise given to Paul Horn, David Ferrucci harbored two conflicting fears. By nature he was given to worrying, and the first of his nightmare scenarios was perfectly natural: A Jeopardy computer would fail, embarrassing the company and his team.
But his second concern, failure’s diabolical twin, was perhaps even more terrifying. What if IBM spent tens of millions of dollars and devoted centuries of researcher years to this project, played it up in the press, and then, perhaps on the eve of the nationally televised Jeopardy showdown, someone beat them to it? Ferrucci pictured a solitary hacker in a garage, cobbling together free software from the Web and maybe hitching it to Wikipedia and other online sites. What if the Jeopardy challenge turned out to be not too hard but too easy?
That would be worse, far worse, than failure. IBM would become the laughingstock of the tech world, an old-line company completely out of touch with the technology revolution—precisely what its corporate customers paid it billions of dollars to track. Ferrucci’s first order of business was to make sure that this could never happen. “It was due diligence,” he later said.
He had a new researcher on his team, James Fan, a young Chinese American with a fresh doctorate from the University of Texas. As a newcomer, Fan was free of institutional preconceptions about how Q-A systems should work. He had no