Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [72]
This additional speed, Hassabis believes, is critical to choosing memories and, perhaps, refining them into concepts. “This gives the high-level neocortex a tremendous number of samples to learn from,” he says, “even if you experience that one important thing only once. Salient memories are biased to be replayed more often.”
It isn’t only that brains focus on the important stuff during dreams—a tear-filled discussion about marriage, a tense showdown with the boss. It’s that they’re able to race through these scenes again and again and again. It’s as if TV news editors got hold of the seventeen hours of each person’s waking life, promptly threw out all the boring material, and repeated the highlights ad nauseam. This isn’t unlike what many experienced in the days after September 11, 2001, when the same footage of jets flying into skyscrapers was aired repeatedly. And if those images now bring to mind certain concepts, such as terrorism, perhaps it’s because the hippocampus, on those late summer nights of 2001, was carrying on additional screenings, racing through them at twenty times the speed, and searing them into our long-term memories.
Even if Hassabis is right about the storage of memories and the development of concepts, transferring this process to computers is sure to be a challenge. He and his fellow researchers in London have to distill the brain’s editing process into algorithms. They will instruct computers to select salient lessons, lead them to experience them repeatedly, and—it’s hoped—learn from them and use them to develop concepts. This is only one of many efforts to produce a cognitive leap in computing. None of them promises rapid results. The technical obstacles are daunting, and they require the very brand of magic—breakthrough ideas—that scientists are hoping to pass on to computers. Hassabis predicts that the process will take five years. “I think we’ll have something by then,” he said.
8. A Season of Jitters
FROM THE VERY FIRST meeting at Culver City, back in the spring of 2007, through all the discussions about a man-machine Jeopardy showdown, one technical issue weighed on Jeopardy executives above all others: Watson’s blazing speed to the buzzer. In a game featuring information hounds who knew most of the answers, the race to the signaling device was crucial. Ken Jennings had proven as much. He wouldn’t have had a chance to show off his lightning fast mind without the support of his equally prodigious thumb. To Harry Friedman and his associate, the producer Rocky Schmidt, it didn’t seem fair that the machine could buzz without pressing a button. They looked at it, naturally enough, from a human perspective. Precious milliseconds ticked by as the command to buzz made its way from the player’s brain through the network of neurons down the arm and to the hand. At that point, if you watched the process in super slow motion, the button would appear to sink into the flesh of the thumb until—finally—the pressure triggered an electronic pulse, identical to Watson’s, asking for the chance to respond to the clue. In this aspect of the game, humans were dragged down by the physical world. It was as if they were fiddling with fax machines while Watson sent e-mails. So in a contentious conference call one morning in March 2010, the Jeopardy contingent laid down the law: To play against humans, Watson would also have to press the button. The computer would need a finger.
Later that day, a visibly perturbed David Ferrucci arrived late for lunch at an Italian restaurant, Il Tramonto, just down the hill from the Hawthorne labs. He joined Watson’s hardware chief, Eddie Epstein, and