Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [54]
Nearly every week for several months, IBM had been bringing in groups of six players with game experience to match wits with Watson in this new mock-Jeopardy studio. They competed on game boards that had already been played in Culver City but not yet telecast. Friedman’s team would not grant IBM access to the elite players who qualified for Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions. They didn’t want to give Watson too much exposure to Jeopardy greatness—at least not yet. For sparring partners, the machine had to settle for mere mortals, players who had won no more than two games in televised matches. It was up to Ferrucci’s team to imagine—or, more likely, to calculate—how much more quickly Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter would respond to the buzzer and how many more answers they’d get right.
By the time Watson started the sparring sessions, in November 2009, the machine had already practiced on tens of thousands of Jeopardy clues. But the move from Hawthorne to the Yorktown research center placed the system in a new and surprising laboratory. Playing the game tested new skills, starting with speed. For two years, development at the Hawthorne labs had focused on Watson’s cognitive process—coaxing it to come up with right answers more often, to advance up the Jennings Arc. During games, though, nailing the answer meant nothing if Watson lost the buzz. At the same time, it had to grapple with strategy. This meant calculating its bets in Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy and estimating its chances on clues it had not yet seen. It also had to anticipate the behavior of its human foes, especially in Final Jeopardy, where single bets often won or lost games.
Perhaps the biggest revelation in the sparring matches came from the spectators: They laughed. They were mostly friends of the players and a smattering of IBM employees, watching from four rows of folding chairs. Watson amused them. This isn’t to say that they weren’t impressed by a machine that came up with some of the most obscure answers in a matter of seconds. But when Watson committed a blooper—and it happened several times a game—they cracked up. They laughed when Watson, exercising its mastery of roman numerals, referred to the civil rights leader Malcolm X as “Malcolm Ten.” They laughed more when Watson, asked what the “Al” in Alcoa stood for, promptly linked the aluminum giant to one of America’s most notorious gangsters: “What is Al Capone?” (Watson, during this stage, often referred to people as things. This established a strange symmetry, since the contestants routinely referred to the Jeopardy machine as “him.”) One Final Jeopardy answer a few weeks later produced more merriment. In the category 19th Century Literature, the clue read: “In Chap. 10, the whole mystery of the handkerchiefs, and the watches, and the jewels . . . Rushed upon this title boy’s ‘mind.’” Instead of Oliver Twist, Watson somehow came up with a British electronic dance music duo, answering, “What is the Pet Shop Boys?”
From a promotional perspective, an occasional nonsensical answer promised to make Watson a more entertaining television performer, as long as the computer kept it clean. This wasn’t always assured. In one of its first sparring sessions, in late 2009, the machine was sailing along, thrashing a couple of mid-level Jeopardy players in front of an audience that included Harry Friedman and fellow Jeopardy bosses. Then Watson startled everyone with a botched answer for a German four-letter word in the category Just Say No. Somehow the machine came up with “What is Fuck?” and flashed the word for all to see on its electronic answer panel. To Watson’s credit, it didn’t have nearly enough confidence in this response to buzz. (It was a human who correctly responded, “What is nein?”) Still, Ferrucci was mortified. It was a relief, he said, to look over at Friedman and his colleagues and see them laughing.
Still, such a blunder could tarnish IBM’s