Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [73]
Where would it stop? If IBM’s engineers fashioned a mechanical finger that worked at ten times the speed of a human digit, would Jeopardy ask them to slow it down? Ferrucci didn’t think so. But it was a concern. “There are deep philosophical issues in all of this,” he said. “They’re getting in there and deciding to graft human limitations onto the machine in order to balance things.”
While the two companies shared the same broad goals, they addressed different constituencies and had different jewels to protect. If Harry Friedman and company focused first on great entertainment, Ferrucci worried, they might tinker with the rules through the rest of the year, making adjustments as one side or the other, either human or machine, appeared to gain a decisive edge. In that case, the basis for the science of the Jeopardy challenge was out the window. Science demanded consistent, verifiable data, all of it produced under rigorous and unchanging conditions. For IBM researchers to publish academic papers on Watson as a specimen of Q-A, they would need such data. For Ferrucci’s team, building the machine alone was a career-making opportunity. But creating the scientific record around it justified the effort among their peers. This was no small consideration for a team of Ph.D.s, especially on a project whose promotional pizzazz raised suspicion, and even resentment, in the computer science community.
In these early months of 2010, tension between the two companies, and between the dictates of entertainment and those of science, was ratcheting up. As the Jeopardy challenge started its stretch run, IBM and Jeopardy entered a period of fears and jitters, marked by sudden shifts in strategy, impasses, and a rising level of apprehension.
In this unusual marriage of convenience, such friction was to be expected, and it was only normal that it would be coming to the surface at this late juncture. For two years, both Jeopardy and IBM had put aside many of the most contentious issues. Why bother hammering out the hard stuff—the details and conditions of the match and the surrounding media storm—when it was no sure thing that an IBM machine would ever be ready to play the game?
That was then. Now the computer in question, the speedy version of Watson, was up the road in Yorktown thrashing humans on a weekly basis. The day before the finger conversation, it had won four of six matches and put up a good fight in the other two. Watson, while still laughably oblivious in entire categories, was emerging as a viable player. The match, which had long seemed speculative, was developing momentum. A long-gestating cover story on the machine in the New York Times Magazine would be out in the next month or so. Watson’s turn on television was going to take place unless someone called a halt. IBM certainly wasn’t about to. But Jeopardy was another matter. Jeopardy’s executives now had to consider how the game might play on TV. They had to envision worst-case scenarios and what impact they might have on their golden franchise. As they saw it, they had to take steps to protect themselves. Adding the finger was just one example. It wasn’t likely to be the last.
Ferrucci ordered chicken escarole soup and a salmon panini. He had the finger on his mind. “So, they come in and say, ‘You know, we don’t like how you’re buzzing. We’re going to give you a human hand,’” he said. “This is like going to Brad Rutter or Ken Jennings and saying, ‘We’re going to cut your hands off and give you someone else’s hands.’ That guy’s going to have to retrain. It’s a whole new game, because now you’re going to have to be a different player. We’ve got to