Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [56]
One of the contestants asked him how Watson “heard” the information. “It reads,” Ferrucci said. “When the clue hits your retina, it hits Watson’s chips.” Another contestant wondered about the algorithms Watson used to analyze the different answers. “Can you tell us how it generates confidence scores?”
“I could tell you,” Ferrucci said, clearly warming to the competitive nature of the Challenge, “but I’d have to shoot you.”
For these sparring rounds, IBM hired a young and telegenic host named Todd Crain. An actor originally from Rockford, Illinois, Crain had blond hair, a square jaw, and a quick wit, and had acted in comedy videos for TheOnion.com. At IBM’s Jeopardy studio, he mastered a fluid and hipper take on Alex Trebek. Unlike Ferrucci’s scientists, who usually referred to Watson as a thing, Crain always addressed Watson as a person. Watson was a character he could relate to, an information prodigy who committed the stupidest and most hilarious errors imaginable. Crain encouraged the machine, flattered it, and upbraided it. Sometimes he closed his eyes theatrically and moaned, “Oooooh, Watson!”
Crain had fallen into the Jeopardy gig months earlier through a chance encounter with David Shepler. Crain was working on a pilot documentary called EcoFreaks, telling the stories of people working at the fringes of the environmental movement. He said it involved spending one evening in New York with “freegans,” Dumpster-divers devoted to reusing trash. On the next assignment, Crain and the crew drove north to the college town of New Paltz, New York. There Shepler—with the attention to detail he later demonstrated managing the Jeopardy project—had built a three-story house that would generate as much energy as it consumed, a so-called zero net-energy structure. While showing Crain the triple-pane windows, geothermal exchange unit, and solar panel inverter, Shepler asked the young actor if he might be interested in hosting a series of Jeopardy shows. “I said ‘yes’ before he even had a chance to finish the sentence,” Crain said.
On occasion, Crain could irritate Ferrucci by making jokes at Watson’s expense. The computer often opened itself to such jibes by mauling pronunciation, especially of foreign words. And it had the unfortunate habit of spelling out punctuation it didn’t understand. One day, in the category Hair-y Situation, Watson said, “Let’s play Hair-dash-Y Situation for two hundred.” Crain imitated this bionic voice, getting a laugh from the small entourage of technicians and scientists. Ferrucci shook his head and muttered. Later, when Crain imitated a mangled name, Ferrucci channeled his irritation into feigned outrage: “He’s making fun of him! It’s like making fun of someone with a speech impediment!” (Once, Ferrucci said, he brought his wife and two daughters to a sparring session. When one of the girls heard Crain mimicking Watson, she said, “Daddy, why is that man being so mean to Watson?”)
As the day’s sparring session began, Crain gave the first two human contestants a chance to acquaint themselves with the buzzers. They tried several dozen old clues. Then he asked if they wanted Watson to join them. They nodded. “Okay, Burn, let him loose,” Crain said. Burn Lewis, the member of Ferrucci’s team who orchestrated the show from a tiny control room, pressed some buttons. The third competitor, an empty presence at the podium bearing the nameplate Watson, assumed its position. It might as well have been a ghost.
In the first game, it was clear the humans were dealing with a prodigious force that behaved differently from them. While humans almost always oriented themselves in a category by starting with the easier $200 clues, Watson began with the $1,000 clues at the bottom of the board and worked its way up. There was a logic to this. While humans heard all the answers, right and wrong, and learned from them, Watson was deaf to the proceedings. If it won the buzz, answered the clue, and got to pick another one, it could assume that