Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [62]
Gondek’s point was that Watson, unlike most question-answering programs, would fall for the same trick. It focused on patterns and correlations and had a statistical version of an associative network. It was susceptible to being primed for “white.” It was like a human in that narrow way.
University researchers in psychology and computational neuroscience are building computer models to probe these similarities. At Carnegie Mellon, a team under John Anderson, a psychology professor, has come up with a cognitive architecture called ACT-R that simulates human thought processes. Like Watson, it’s a massively parallel system fueled by statistical analysis.
Yet the IBM team resolutely avoided comparisons between Watson’s design and that of a brain. Any claims of higher intelligence on the part of their machine, they knew, would provoke a storm of criticism from psychologists and the AI community alike. It was true that on occasion Watson and the human brain appeared to follow similar patterns. But that, said Gondek, was only because they were programmed, each in its own way, to handle the same job.
A few months later, Greg Lindsay was eating sushi in a small Japanese restaurant near his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his thinning hair was cut so short that it stood straight up. He had to eat quickly. A book editor was waiting for the manuscript fixes on his book, Aerotropolis. It was about the rise of cities built around airports, and it fit his insatiable hunger for facts. He said he had had to delve deeply into transportation, energy, global manufacturing, and economics. Little surprise, then, that the book was nearly five hundred pages long.
Lindsay said he had assumed that Watson would maul him in the sparring rounds, beating him to the buzzer every time. This hadn’t happened. By anticipating the end of Todd Crain’s delivery of the clue, he had managed to outbuzz Watson a number of times. He also thought that the extra time to answer Final Jeopardy would give Watson plenty of opportunity to find the right answer. This clearly was not the case. In fact, this extra time raised questions among Ferrucci’s team. To date, Watson was answering every question the same way, as if it had the usual three to five seconds, even when it had five or six times as long. That meant that it was forgoing precious time that it could be spending hunting and evaluating potential answers. Would that extra time help? Just a few days before, Gondek had said that he wasn’t sure. With more time, he said, “Watson might bring more wrong answers to the surface and undermine its confidence in the right one.” In other words, the computer ran the risk of overthinking. In the coming months, Gondek and his colleagues thought they might test a couple of other approaches, but they were starting to run out of time.
For his strategy against Watson, Lindsay said, he took a page out of the William Goldman novel The Princess Bride. The hero in the story is facing a fight with a much better swordsman, so he contrives to move the fight to a stony surface, where the rival might slip. In the same way, Lindsay steered Watson to an equally unstable arena: “areas of semantic complexity.” He predicted that humans playing Watson in the television showdown would follow the same strategy.
But there was one big difference. With a million dollars at stake, the humans would not only be battling Watson, they’d also be competing against each other. This could change the dynamics dramatically. In the sparring sessions, the humans (playing with funny money) focused exclusively on the machine. “I didn