Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [52]
It was a snowy day in February 2010 when the marketing team unveiled prototypes of the Watson avatar for David Ferrucci. Ferrucci was working from home with a slow computer connection, so it took him several long minutes to download the video of the avatar in action. “It’s amazing we can get a computer to answer a question in three seconds and it still takes fifteen minutes to download a file,” he muttered. When he finally had the video, the creative team walked him through different possible versions of Watson. They weren’t sure yet whether the avatar would reside in a clear globe, a reddish sphere, or perhaps a simple black screen. However it was deployed, it would continuously shift into numerous states of listening and answering. Miles Gilbert, the art director, explained that the five bars of the Smarter Planet icon would stay idle in the background “and then pop up when he becomes active.”
“This is mesmerizing,” Ferrucci said. But he had some complaints. He thought that the avatar could show more of the computation going on inside the machine. Already, the threads seemed to simulate a cognitive process. They came from different parts of the globe and some grew brighter while others faded. This was actually what was happening computationally, he said, as Watson entertained hundreds of candidate answers and sifted them down to a handful and then just one. Wouldn’t it be possible to add this type of real-time data to the machine? “It would be neat if all this movement was less random and meant more,” he said.
It sounded like an awful lot of work for something that might fill a combined six minutes of television time. “You’re suggesting that there should be thousands of threads, and then they’re boiled down to five threads, and ultimately one?” asked a member of the research division’s press team.
“Yeah,” Ferrucci said. “These are threads in massive parallelism. As they come more and more together, they compete with each other. Then you’re down to the five we put on the [answer] panel. One of them’s the brightest, which we put into our answer. This,” he said emphatically, “could be more precise in its meaning.”
There was silence on the line as the artists and PR people digested this contribution from the world of engineering. They moved on to the types of data that Watson could produce for its avatar. Could the system deliver the precise number of candidate answers? Could it show its levels of confidence in each one rising and falling? Ferrucci explained that the machine’s ability to produce data was nearly limitless—though he wanted to make sure that this side job didn’t interfere with its Jeopardy play. “I’m tempted to say something I’ll probably regret,” he said. “We can tell you after each question the probability that we’re going to win the game.” He laughed. “Is there room for that analysis?”
It was around this time that Ferrucci, focusing on the red circular version of Watson, started to carry out image searches on the Internet. He was looking for Kubrick’s 2001. “You probably want to avoid that red-eye look,” he said, “because when it’s pulsating, it looks like HAL. I’m looking at the HAL eye on the Web. It’s red and circular, and kind of global. It’s sort of like Smarter Planet, actually.”
The call ended with Ferrucci promising new streams of Watson data for Joshua Davis and his colleagues at Ogilvy. They had at least until summer to get the avatar up and running. But the rest of Watson—the faceless brain with its new body—was heading into its first round of sparring matches. They would be the first