Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [74]
From Ferrucci’s perspective, the match was intriguing precisely because the contestants were different. Each side had its own strengths. The computer could rearrange numbers and letters in certain puzzle clues with astonishing speed. The human understood jokes. The computer flipped through millions of possibilities in a second; the human, with a native grasp of language, didn’t need to. Trying to bring them into synch with each other would be impossible. What’s more, he suspected that any handicapping would target only one of the parties: his machine. Just imagine, he said, laughing, if they decided that the humans had an unfair advantage in language. “They could give them the clues in ones and zeros!”
Nonetheless, the Jeopardy crew seemed intent on balancing the two sides. Another buzzer issue had come up earlier in the month. In order to keep players from buzzing too quickly, before the light came on, Jeopardy had long instituted a quarter-second penalty for early buzzers. The player’s buzzer remained locked out during that period—a relative eternity in Jeopardy—and gave other, more patient rivals a first crack at the clue. But Watson, whose response was activated by the light, never fell into that trap. Its entire Jeopardy existence was engineered to be penalty free. So shouldn’t Jeopardy remove the penalty for the human players as well?
For Ferrucci, this change spelled potential disaster. Humans could already beat Watson to the buzzer by anticipating the light, he said. Jennings was a master at it, and plenty of humans in sparring sessions had proven that Watson, while fast, was beatable. The electrical journey from brain to finger took humans two hundred milliseconds, about ten times as long as Watson. But by anticipating, many humans in the sparring sessions had buzzed within single milliseconds of the light. Greg Lindsay had demonstrated the technique in the three consecutive sparring sessions he’d won. If Jeopardy lifted the quarter-second penalty, humans could buzz repeatedly as early as they wanted while Watson waited for the light to come on. Picture a street corner in Manhattan where one tourist waits obediently for the traffic light to change while masses of New Yorkers blithely jaywalk, barely looking left or right. In a Jeopardy game without a penalty for early buzzing, Watson might similarly find itself waiting at the corner—and lose every buzz.
The IBM researchers could, of course, teach Watson to anticipate the buzz. But it would be a monumental task. It might require outfitting Watson with ears. Then they’d have to study the patterns of Alex Trebek’s voice, the time it took him to read clues of differing lengths, the average gap in milliseconds between his last syllable and the activation of the light. It would require the efforts of an entire team and exhaustive testing during the remaining sparring sessions, made more difficult because Trebek, raised in Canada, had different voice patterns than his IBM fill-in, Todd Crain, from Illinois. It would amount to an entire research project—which would likely be useless to IBM outside the narrow confines of a specific game show. Ferrucci wouldn’t even consider it.
Loughran thought Ferrucci and Friedman could iron out many of these points with a one-on-one conversation. “Why don’t you pick up the phone and call Harry?” he said. “You negotiate. If they get the finger, you get rid of the anticipatory buzzing.”
Ferrucci shrugged. His worries ran deeper than the finger and the buzzer. He was far more concerned about the clues Watson would face. Unlike chess, Jeopardy was a game created, week by week, by humans. A team of ten writers formulated the clues and the categories. If they knew that their clues would be used in the man-machine match, mightn’t they be tempted, perhaps unconsciously, to test the machine? “As soon as you create a situation in which the human writer, the person casting the