Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [77]
He described how the contestants are sequestered during the filming, accompanied by handlers and prohibited from mingling with anyone with access to the clues. He recalled one time that Ken Jennings, hurrying to change a tie that “strobed on camera,” ducked into a little nook where Alex Trebek checked his appearance before stepping onto the set. This was a breach. The three players had to always stick together, under surveillance, so that no one could even be suspected of receiving favorable treatment. Jennings was quickly ousted as if he’d been a North Korean commander strolling into a meeting of the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon. Friedman laughed. “He could have been shot.” Then he play-acted. “Oh, sorry Ken, we had to wing you in your foot there, but your buzzer thumb seems to be intact. Are you OK to play the next show? You wandered into a secure area . . .”
Friedman brushed off Ferrucci’s suggestion that the results of the game could have a lasting impact on the Jeopardy franchise, much as Kasparov’s loss to Deep Blue forever changed chess. He laughed. “When all of this, as wonderful as it is, is over, we’re going to continue playing our game. We’re going to continue what got us here through six thousand shows.” The message to IBM: “Thanks for coming. Thanks for playing. We’re back to our day jobs.”
The tentative plan had been for the IBM team to move Watson to the Culver City studios in late 2010. It would participate in a championship match, playing against Ken Jennings and the winner of an invitational tournament of past champions. But bringing the machine into Jeopardy’s “tightly run ship,” it was now clear, raised complications, including demands to change the show’s tried-and-tested procedures. It raised the risk of rancor and public accusations. And it wasn’t just the scientists who might complain. The humans would be playing for a million-dollar prize, underwritten by IBM. If they suspected any tilting in the competition, they were sure to speak up as well. In a sense, Watson’s intrusion into the Jeopardy world represented a potential breach of its own. Friedman had to weigh his options.
One of Jeopardy’s biggest fears, Ferrucci believed, was that Watson would grow dramatically smarter and faster over the summer and lay waste to its human foes. This was early May, weeks after Jeopardy had begun to reconsider the match. He was sitting in the empty observation room on the Jeopardy set in Yorktown. At the podium on the other side of the window, Watson had been beating humans in sparring sessions about 65 percent of the time but showing few signs of frightening dominance. The Jeopardy crew, he said, continued to assess the matches. “Is this fun, is this entertaining, is this speaking to our audience?” A superendowed Watson, conceivably, would drain the match of all suspense. In that case, according to Ferrucci, “People would say, ‘Of course computers can beat humans! Why did you promote all this?’”
Ferrucci wished it were true, that with a few devilishly smart new algorithms Watson would leap forward into a class of its own. That way he might sleep better. But he didn’t see it happening. “We’re working our butts off,” he said. “But I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of difference in Watson’s performance four months from now, when we have to freeze the system. But they don’t know that,” he said. “How could they know? They’re not doing the science.”
Jeopardy’s executives also worried, he said, that IBM could jack up Watson’s speed simply