Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [34]
When word of this performance spread around the Yorktown labs, it only fueled the concerns that Ferrucci’s team was heading for an embarrassing fall—if it ever got that far. Mark Wegman, then the head of computer science at IBM Research, described himself as someone who’s “usually wildly optimistic about technology.” But when he saw the initial numbers, he said, “I thought there was a 10 percent chance that in five years we could pull it off.”
For Ferrucci, Piquant’s failure was anything but discouraging. It gave him the impetus to march ahead on a different path, toward Blue J. “This was a chance to do something really, really big,” he said. However, he wasn’t sure his team would see it this way. So he gathered the group of twelve in a small meeting room at the Hawthorne labs. He started by describing the challenges ahead. It would be a three- to five-year project, similar in length to a military deployment. It would be intense, and it could be disastrous. But at the same time they had an opportunity to do something memorable. “We could sit here writing papers for the next five years,” he said, “or we build an entirely new type of computer.” He introduced, briefly, a nugget of realpolitik. There would be no other opportunities for them in Q-A technologies within IBM. He had effectively engineered a land grab, putting every related resource into his Jeopardy ecosystem. If they wanted to do this kind of science, he said, “this was the only place to be.”
Then he went around the room with a simple question: “Are you in or are you out?”
One by one, the researchers said yes. But their response was not encouraging. The consensus was that they could build a machine that could compete—but probably not beat—a human champion. “We thought it could earn positive money before getting to Final Jeopardy,” said Chu-Carroll, one of the only holdovers on Ferrucci’s team from the old TRec unit. “At least we wouldn’t be kicked off the stage.”
With this less than ringing endorsement, Ferrucci sent word to Paul Horn that the Jeopardy challenge was on. He promised to have a machine, within twenty-four months, that could compete against average human players. Within thirty-six to forty-eight months, his machine, he said, would beat champions one-quarter of the time. And within five to seven years, the Jeopardy machine would be “virtually unbeatable.” He added that this final goal might not be worth pursuing. “It is more useful,” he said, “to create a system that is less than perfect but easily adapted to new areas.” A week later, Ferrucci and a small team from IBM Research flew to Culver City, to the Robert Young Building on the Sony lot. There they’d see whether Harry Friedman would agree to let the yet-to-be-built Blue J play Jeopardy on national television.
4. Educating Blue J
JENNIFER CHU-CARROLL, sitting amid a clutter of hardware and piles of paper in her first-floor office in the Hawthorne labs, wondered what in the world to teach Blue J. How much of the Bible would it have to know? The Holy Book popped up in hundreds of Jeopardy clues. But did that mean the computer needed to know every psalm, the laws of Deuteronomy, Jonah’s thoughts and prayers while inside the whale? Would a dose of Dostoevsky help? She could feed it The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, or any of the other classics that might pop up in a Jeopardy clue. When it came to traditional book knowledge, feeding Blue J’s brain was nearly as easy as Web surfing.
This was in July 2007. Chu-Carroll’s boss, David Ferrucci, and the small IBM contingent had just flown back from Culver City, where they had been given a provisional thumbs-up from Harry Friedman. A man-machine match would take place, perhaps in late 2010 or early 2011. IBM needed the deadline to mobilize the effort within the company and to establish