Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [76]
Through the month of April, on conference calls and in meetings, Ferrucci repeatedly voiced his concerns to the Jeopardy team. He wasn’t concentrating on the finger anymore. He had made that concession, and a hardware team at IBM was busy creating one. They estimated that it would slow Watson’s response time by eight milliseconds. But Ferrucci continued to push for the sixty matches with champions. In April, Jeopardy’s Friedman and Schmidt came to watch a sparring match. In the meeting with them that followed, Ferrucci went on at length about unconscious writers’ bias and tainted questions. “Dave really hammered on these points,” said one participant. The Jeopardy executives defended their processes and protocols. The conversation grew heated. A camera crew was filming the meeting for a documentary. They were asked to leave.
That was when Jeopardy, in Friedman’s term, “stepped back.” In late April, Friedman’s team sent word to IBM that they were reconsidering every aspect of the competition, including the match itself. With this news, Watson was suddenly put into the same powerless position as thousands of other Jeopardy wannabes: waiting for an invitation. Unlike the aspiring human players, though, Watson had no other occupation, no other purpose on earth. What’s more, it had the hopes of a $96 billion corporation resting on it. And within weeks, millions of New York Times readers would be learning about the coming match in a Sunday magazine cover story—unless Loughran, IBM’s press officer, alerted the Times that the match was in trouble. He keep quiet, trusting that the two sides would resolve their disagreements.
A week later, Friedman was sitting in his office on the Sony lot in Culver City. The walls were plastered with photographs and awards from his forty-year career in game shows, his seven Emmys, and his Cable and Broadcasting Hall of Fame plaque. It had been a tense day. That morning he had had another contentious phone conversation with Ferrucci, according to IBM. And he had to iron out strategy with Rocky Schmidt and Lisa Broffman, another producer on the show, before Schmidt flew to Europe the next day. “We’ve been so immersed in this,” Friedman said, minutes after meeting with Schmidt, “that we’re stepping back just a little bit and thinking of the various ramifications. We’re analyzing every aspect now. This is a big deal.”
Ferrucci’s concerns about bias left the Jeopardy executives feeling exposed. The IBM scientist, after all, was implying that Jeopardy’s writers might tilt the match toward one side or the other—or at least be perceived as doing so. Ferrucci was always careful to ascribe this possibility to unconscious bias. But for Jeopardy, a franchise born from the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, the hint of such bias—conscious or not—was poisonous. And even if Ferrucci kept this concern to himself, the point he made repeatedly was that other scientists would raise the very same questions. If it was even within the realm of possibility that Jeopardy had an interest in the outcome and if it used its own people to write the clues, the fairness of the game and the validity of the contest were compromised.
For Friedman,