Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [55]
As each day’s sparring sessions began, the six Jeopardy players settled into folding chairs between the three contestant podiums, the host’s stand, and the big Jeopardy board, with its familiar grid of thirty clues. David Shepler stood before them. Dark, thin, and impeccably dressed, Shepler ran the logistics of the Jeopardy project. He sweated the details. He made sure that IBM followed to the letter the legal agreements covering the play. He didn’t bend an inch for Watson. (It was his ruling that docked Watson $600 for mispronouncing Pakistan.) In the War Room’s culture of engineers and scientists, Shepler, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, was an outsider. He told them what they could not do, which at times led to resentment. Before each match, he instructed the contestants on the rules. They weren’t to tell anyone or—heaven forbid—blog about the matches, the behavior of Watson, or the clues, which had been entrusted to IBM by Jeopardy. He had them sign lengthy nondisclosure agreements and then introduced David Ferrucci.
On this winter morning, Ferrucci ambled to the front of the room. He was wearing dark slacks and a black pullover bearing IBM’s logo. He outlined the Jeopardy challenge and described the goal of building a question-answering dynamo. He pointed to the window behind them, where a set of blue rectangular towers housed the computers running the Watson program. Through the double-pane window, the players could hear the dull roar of the fans working to cool its processors. Ferrucci, priming the humans for the match ahead, tossed out a couple of Jeopardy clues, which they handled with ease. “Oh, I bet Watson’s getting nervous,” he said. “He could be in for a tough day.”
Still, Watson had made astounding progress since its early days in the War Room. Ferrucci showed a slide of what used to be the Jennings Arc. It had the same constellation of Jennings dots floating high and to the right. But it had been expanded into a Winners Cloud, with blue dots representing hundreds of other Jeopardy winners. Most of the winners occupied the upper right quadrant, but below and to the left of most of Jennings’s dots. The average winner buzzed on about half the questions and got four out of five right. Ferrucci traced Watson’s path on the chart. The computer, which in 2007 produced subhuman results, now came up with confident answers to about two-thirds of the clues it encountered and got more than 80 percent of them right. This level of performance put it smack in the middle of the Winners Cloud. Though not yet in Ken Jennings’s orbit, but it was moving in that direction. Of its thirty-eight games to date against experienced players, Ferrucci said, it had won 66 percent, coming in third only 10 percent of the time.
While explaining Watson’s cognitive process, Ferrucci pointed to a black electronic panel. The players wouldn’t see it during the game, he explained, but this panel would show the audience Watson’s top five candidate answers for each question and how much confidence the machine had in each one. “This gives you a look into Watson’s brain,” he said. Moments later, he gave them a glimpse into his own. Showing how the computer answered a complicated clue featuring the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, Ferrucci pointed to the list of candidate answers. “I was confident and I got it right,” he said. Then, realizing that he was doing a mind meld, he explained