Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [44]
Brown’s team proceeded to analyze Blue J’s performance against the clues, year by year. They were stunned to see that the machine’s scores plummeted when answering clues from 2003 and remained at that lower level. It was as if the machine got dumber, by about 10 percent. As Blue J answered the newer questions, its precision stayed constant. In other words, it didn’t make more mistakes. But with a lower level of confidence, it didn’t buzz as often. Blue J was more confused.
The IBM team called this shift “climate change.” For weeks, researchers pored over Jeopardy data, trying to figure out why in season 20, from September of 2003 to the following July, the questions suddenly became harder for Blue J. Was it more puzzles or puns? They couldn’t tell.
That twentieth season was the one in which Ken Jennings began his remarkable run. Was Jeopardy toughening the clues for Jennings and unwittingly making the game harder for Blue J? That seemed unlikely, especially since it would be difficult to make the game harder for the omniscient Jennings without also ratcheting it up for his competitors. Ferrucci and his team asked Friedman about the change. He said he didn’t know—and added that at this point IBM certainly knew more about Jeopardy clues than he did.
Climate change meant that as Blue J prepared for its first matches with human Jeopardy champs—so-called sparring sessions—two-thirds of its training set was too easy. It was like a student who crams for twelfth-grade finals only to see, late in the game, that he’s been consulting eleventh-grade textbooks. From Blue J’s perspective, the game had just gotten considerably harder.
5. Watson’s Face
IN THE FALL of 1992, a young painter named Joshua Davis moved from Colorado to New York City and enrolled at the prestigious Pratt Institute. After a year, he switched from painting to illustration, where there were better career opportunities. “I thought, ‘I’ll still paint. It’ll just be for the Man,’” Davis said. But when he sent his work to two book publishers, hoping to line up illustration contracts for children’s books, the response was essentially, as he put it, “‘Thanks but no thanks, and like, who the fuck are you?’”
Davis didn’t take it too hard. His self-esteem was strong enough to withstand a knock or two. A bit later a friend at school steered him toward the digital world. “He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, man, there’s this whole Internet thing now. Like books are dead.’” Davis said he was “totally naive” at that point. “I said, ‘Cool. Print’s dead. Fantastic!’” He promptly bought an old computer, but it lacked an operating system. So he went to a bookstore and bought one last artifact from the printed world: a manual for the new open-source system called Linux. A diskette he found at the back of the book contained the software. “I was like, ‘Score!’” he said.
Davis didn’t know he was about to tackle what he calls the “world’s hardest operating system.” But as he taught himself about user interface design, programming, and video graphics, he had an epiphany. He wasn’t going to use computers simply to create designs more quickly or to reach more people. The technology itself, following his instructions, would generate the art. “At the time I thought, ‘The Internet is my new canvas,’” he said.
His first corporate job was for Microsoft. He designed visual applications for Internet Explorer 4, which debuted in 1997. For the next few years, he became a leader in the new field of generative art, using programs to combine data into colors and patterns that could morph into countless variations. For this he harnessed movements from nature, such as wind, flowing water, and swarming birds and insects. He even turned his body into an evolving canvas. He had his entire left