Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [53]
6. Watson Takes On Humans
EARLY IN THE MATCH, David Ferrucci sensed that something was amiss. He was in the observation room next to the improvised Jeopardy studio at IBM Research on a midwinter morning in 2010. On the other side of the window, Watson was battling two humans—and appeared to be melting under the pressure. One Daily Double should have been an easy factoid: “This longest Italian river is fed by 141 tributaries.” Yet the computer inexplicably came up with “What is _____?” No Tiber, no Rubicon, no Po (the correct response). It didn’t come up with a single body of water, Italian or otherwise. It drew a blank.
Ferrucci leaned forward, looking agitated, and said to no one in particular, “It doesn’t feel right. Did you leave off half the system?” His colleagues, all typing on their laptops, kept their heads down and murmured that they hadn’t. To engage Ferrucci when he was in a darkening mood could backfire. No one was looking for a confrontation this early in the morning.
Watson continued to malfunction. As the two Jeopardy players outscored the machine, it developed a small speech defect. Its genial male voice started to add a “D” to words ending in “N.” In the category the Second Largest City, Watson buzzed for the clue, Lahore, and confidently answered, “What is Pakistand?” After a short consultation, the game judge, strictly following the rules, declared the answer incorrect. That turned Watson’s $600 gain into a loss, a difference of $1,200. “This is ridiculous,” Ferrucci muttered.
Then Watson, a still faceless presence at the far left podium, began to place some ludicrous bets. In one game, it was losing to a journalist and former Jeopardy champion named Greg Lindsay, $12,400 to $6,700. Watson landed on a Daily Double. If it bet big, it could pull even with Lindsay or even inch ahead. Yet it wagered a laughable $5. It was Watson’s second strange bet in a row. The researchers groaned in unison. Some of their colleagues were sitting in the studio with the New York Times Magazine’s Clive Thompson, who was writing a piece on Watson. They looked through the window at Ferrucci and shrugged, as if to ask “What’s up with this beast?”
But Ferrucci didn’t see them. He was staring at David Gondek. Lithe and unusually cheerful, Gondek was a leading member of the team. Unlike most of his suburban colleagues, he lived far south in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, taking the train and biking from the station. He headed up machine learning and game strategy and seemed to have a hand in practically every aspect of Watson. Ferrucci continued to stare wordlessly at him. Gondek, after all, was responsible for programming Watson’s betting strategy, and it looked like the computer was playing to lose. Ferrucci, during this brief interlude, was carrying out an inquisition with his eyes.
Gondek looked up at his boss. “It’s a heuristic,” he explained. He meant that Watson was placing bets according to a simple formula. Gondek and his colleagues were hard at work on a more sophisticated betting strategy, which they hoped would be ready in a month. But for now, the computer relied on a handful of rules to guide its wagers.
“I didn’t realize that it was this stupid!” Ferrucci said. “You never told me it was brain-dead.” He gestured toward Thompson, who was watching the game on the other side of the glass and taking notes on his laptop. “We really enjoy stinking it up for the New York Times writer.”
Gondek started to explain the thinking behind the heuristic. If Watson had barely half the winnings of the leader, one of its rules told it not to risk much in a Daily Double. Its primary goal at this point was not to catch up but to reach Final Jeopardy within striking distance of the leader. If it fell below half of the leader’s total, it risked being locked out of Final Jeopardy