Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [27]
Fan, who emigrated as an eighteen-year-old from Shanghai to study at the University of Iowa and later Texas, had focused his graduate work on teaching machines to come to grips with our imprecise language. His system would help them understand, for example, that in certain contexts the symbol H2O might represent a single molecule of water while in others it could refer to the sloshing contents of Lake Michigan. This expertise might eventually help teach a machine to understand Jeopardy clues and to hunt down answers. But it hardly prepared him for the job he now faced: building a Jeopardy computer all by himself. His system would be known as Basement Baseline.
As Fan undertook his assignment, Ferrucci ordered his small Q-A team to adapt their own system to the challenge, and he would pit the two systems against each other. Ferrucci called this “a bake-off.” The inside team would use the Piquant technology developed at IBM while the outside team, consisting solely of James Fan, would scour the entire world for the data and software to jury-rig a bionic Jeopardy player. They each had four weeks and a set of five hundred Jeopardy clues to train on. Would either system be able to identify the parent bird of the roasted young squab (What is a pigeon?) or the sausage celebrated every year since 1953 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin (What is bratwurst?)? If so, would either have enough confidence in its answers to bet on them?
Ferrucci suspected at the time that his solitary hacker would come up with ideas that might prove useful. The bake-off, he said, would also send a message to the rest of the team that a Jeopardy challenge would require reaching outside the company for new ideas and approaches. He wanted to subject everyone to Darwinian pressures. The point was “to have technologies competing,” he said. “If somebody’s not getting it done, if he’s stuck, we’re going to take code away from him and give it to someone else.” This, he added, was “horrific for researchers.” Those lines of software may have taken months or even years to develop. They contained the researcher’s ideas and insights reduced to a mathematical elegance. They were destined for greatness, perhaps coder immortality. And one day they could be ripped away and given to a colleague—a competitor, essentially—who might make better use of them. Not everyone appreciated this. “One guy went to his manager,” Ferrucci said, “and said that the bake-off was ‘bad for morale.’ I said, ‘Welcome to the WORLD!’”
So on a February day in 2007, James Fan set out to program a Q-A machine all by himself. He was relatively isolated in a second-floor office while the rest of Ferrucci’s team mingled on the first floor. He would continue to run into them in the cafeteria, and they would attend meetings together. After all, they were colleagues, each one of them engaged in a venture that many in the company viewed as hopeless. “I was the most optimistic member of the team,” Fan later said, “and I was thinking, ‘We can make a decent showing.’” As he saw it, “decent” meant losing to human champions but nailing a few questions and ending up with a positive score.
Fan started by drawing up an inventory of the software tools and reference documents he thought he’d need for his machine. First would be a so-called type system. This would help the computer figure out if it was looking for a person, place, animal, or thing. After all, if it didn’t know what it was looking for, finding an answer was little more than a crapshoot; generating enough “confidence” to bet on that answer would be impossible. The computer would be lost.
For humans, distinguishing President George Washington from the bridge named after him wasn’t much of a challenge.