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By Root 308 0

when IBM presided over the rest of the infant computer industry, the company cleared woods on a hill in Yorktown Heights, New York, about forty miles north of midtown Manhattan, and hired the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen to design a lab. If computing was the future, as seemed inevitable, it was on this hill that a good part of it would be dreamed up, modeled mathematically, and prototyped. Saarinen was a natural choice to express this sparkling future in glass and rock. A year earlier, he had designed the winged TWA Terminal for the new Idlewild Airport (later called JFK). Before that, he’d drawn up the majestic Gateway Arch that would loom over St. Louis. In Yorktown, it was as if he had laid the Gateway Arch on its side. The building, with three stories of glass walls, curved along the top of the hill. For visitors strolling the wide corridors decades later, the combination of the structure’s rough stone and the broad vistas of rolling hills still delivered just the right message of wealth, vision, and permanence.

The idea for a Jeopardy machine, at least according to one version of the story, dates back to an autumn day in 2004. For several years, top executives at the company had been pushing researchers to come up with the next Grand Challenge. In the ’90s, the challenge had been to build a computer that would beat a grand champion in chess. This produced Deep Blue. Its 1997 victory over Garry Kasparov turned into a global event and fortified IBM’s reputation as a giant in cutting-edge computing. (This grew more important as consumer and Web companies, from Microsoft to Yahoo!, threatened to steal the spotlight—and the young brainpower. Google was still just a couple of grad students at Stanford.) Later, in another Grand Challenge in the first years of the new century, IBM produced Blue Gene, the world’s fastest supercomputer.

What would the next challenge be? On that fall day, a senior manager at IBM Research named Charles Lickel drove north from his lab, up the Hudson, to the town of Poughkeepsie, and spent the day with a small team he managed. That evening, the group went to the Sapore Steakhouse in nearby Fishkill, where they could order venison, elk, or buffalo, or split a whopping fifty-two-ounce porterhouse steak for two. There, something strange happened. At seven o’clock, many of the diners stood up from their tables, their food untouched, and filed into the bar, which had a television set. “The dining room emptied,” Lickel said. People were packed in there, three rows deep, to see whether Ken Jennings, who had won more than fifty straight matches on Jeopardy, would win again. He did. A half hour later, the crowd returned to their food, raving about the question-answering phenom. As Lickel noted, their steaks had to have been stone cold.

Though he hadn’t watched much Jeopardy since he was a kid, that scene in the bar gave him an idea for the next Grand Challenge. What if an IBM computer could beat Ken Jennings? (Other accounts have it that the vision for a Jeopardy computer was already circulating along the corridors of the Yorktown lab. The original idea, it turns out, is tough to trace.)

In any event, Lickel pushed the idea. In the first meeting, it provoked plenty of dissent. Chess was nearly as clean and timeless as mathematics itself, a cerebral treasure handed down through the ages. Jeopardy, by contrast, looked questionable from the get-go. Produced by a publicly traded company, Sony, and subject to ratings and advertisers, it was in the business of making money and pleasing investors. It was Hollywood, for crying out loud. “There was a lot of doubt in the room,” Lickel said. “People wanted something more obviously scientific.” A second argument was perhaps more compelling: people playing Jeopardy would in all likelihood annihilate an IBM machine. “They all grabbed me after the meeting,” Lickel recalled, “and said, ‘Charles, you’re going to regret this.’”

In the end, it was up to Paul Horn. A former professor of physics at the University of Chicago, Horn had headed IBM’s three-thousand-person