Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [37]
Blue J was painfully slow. Laboring on a single computer, it created a logjam of data, sending information through the equivalent of a skinny straw when it needed a fire hose. It didn’t have enough bandwidth (the rate of data transfer). And it lacked computing muscle. This led to delays, or latency. It often took an hour or two to puzzle out the meaning of the clue, dig through its data to come up with a long list of possible answers, or “candidates,” evaluate them, choose one, and decide whether it was confident enough to bet. The best way to run the tests, Chu-Carroll and her colleagues eventually realized, was to ask Blue J questions before lunch. The machine would cogitate; they’d eat. It was an efficient division of labor.
An hour or so after they returned to the office, Blue J’s list of candidate answers would arrive. Many of them were on target, but some were ridiculous. One clue, for example, read: “A 2000 ad showing this pop sensation at ages 3 & 18 was the 100th “got milk?” ad.” Blue J, after exhaustive work, missed the answer (“Who is Britney Spears?”) by a mile, suggesting “What is Holy Crap?” as a possibility. The machine also volunteered that the diet of grasshoppers was “kosher” and that the Russian word for goodbye (“What is do svidaniya?”) was “cholesterol.”
The dumb answers didn’t matter—at least not yet. They had to do with the computer’s discernment, which was still primitive. The main concern for the Jeopardy team at this stage was whether the correct answer popped up anywhere at all on its list. This was its measure of binary recall, a metric that Blue J shared with humans. If a student in geography were asked about the capital of Romania, she might come up with Budapest and Bucharest and not remember which of the two was right. In Blue J’s world, those would be her candidate answers, and she clearly had the data in her head to answer correctly. From Chu-Carroll’s perspective, this student would have passed the binary recall test and needed no more data on capitals. (She just had to brush up on the ones she knew.) In a similar test, Blue J clearly didn’t recognize Britney Spears or do svidaniya as the correct answer. But if those words showed up somewhere on its candidate lists, then it had the wherewithal to answer them (once it got smarter). By focusing on categories where Blue J struck out most often, the researchers worked to fill in the holes in its knowledge base.
Week by week, gigabyte by gigabyte, Blue J’s trove of data grew. But by the standards of consumer electronics, it remained a pip-squeak. The fifth-generation iPods, which were selling five miles down the road, stored 30 to 80 gigabytes. Blue J topped out at the level of a midrange iPod, at some 75 gigabytes. Within a year or two, cell phones might hold as much. But there was a reason for the coziness of Blue J’s stash. The more data it had to rummage through, the longer it took—and it was already painfully slow. What’s more, the easiest and clearest sources for Blue J to digest were lists and encyclopedia entries. They were short and to the point, and harder for their literal-minded pupil to misinterpret. And they didn’t take up much disk space.
While Chu-Carroll wrestled with texts, James Fan was part of a team grappling with a challenge every bit as important: coaxing the machine to understand the convoluted Jeopardy clues. If Blue J couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to look for, the data on its disk wouldn’t make any difference. From Blue J’s perspective, each clue was a riddle to be decoded, and the key was to figure out the precise object of its hunt. Was it a country? A person? A kind of fish? In Jeopardy, it wasn’t always clear.
The crucial task was to spot the word representing what Blue J was supposed to find. In everyday questions, finding it was simple. In “Who assassinated President Lincoln?” or “Where did Columbus land in 1492?” the “who” and “where” point to a killer and a place. But in Jeopardy, where the clues are statements and the answers questions, finding these key words, known as Lexical Answer