Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [80]
“There are ways to measure it,” Fan said. “We can look at how many instances there are of the LAT in Yago”—a huge semantic database with details on more than two million entities. “And if it isn’t there, we can classify it as “weird.”
“Just based on frequency?” Ferrucci said. There were only weeks left to program Watson, and he saw this “weird” grouping as a wasteful detour. In the end, he gave Fan the go-ahead. “If something looks hare-brained and it’s only going to take a couple of days, you do it.” But he worried that such last-minute fixes might help Watson on a couple of clues and disorient it on many others. And there were still so many other problems to solve.
By the end of June, two weeks after Watson graced the cover of the New York Times Magazine, Harry Friedman had come to a decision. The solution was to remove the man-machine match, with all of its complications, from Jeopardy’s programming schedule. “This is an exhibition,” he said, adding that it made the “whole process a lot more streamlined.” Jeopardy would follow its normal schedule. The season of matches would feature only humans. Writers would follow the standard protocols. Nothing would change. The Watson match, with its distinct rules and procedures, would exist in a world of its own. In a call to IBM, Friedman outlined the new rules of engagement. The match would take place in mid-January at IBM Research. It would feature Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in two half-hour games. The winner as in all Jeopardy tournaments, would be the player with the highest combined winnings.
Friedman addressed Ferrucci’s concerns about writers’ bias by enlarging the pool of games. Each year the Jeopardy writers produced about a hundred games for the upcoming season, with taping starting in July. A few days before taping, an official from Sullivan Compliance Company, an outside firm that monitors game shows, would select thirty of those games. He would not see the clues or categories and would pick two of the games only by numbers given to them. Once the games were selected, a Jeopardy producer would look at the clues and categories. If any of them overlapped with those that Jennings or Rutter had previously faced, or included the types of audio and visual clues that were off-limits for Watson, the category would be removed and replaced by a similar one from another of the thirty games. If a Melville category recalled one that Jennings had faced in his streak, they might replace it with another featuring Balzac or Whitman. And for Watson’s scientific demonstration, the machine would play fifty-six matches throughout the fall against Tournament of Champions qualifiers. This was the best test stock Jeopardy had to offer—the closest it could come to the two superstars Watson would face in January.
Jeopardy, eager for a blockbuster, had come up with a scheme to manage the risks. After months of fretting, the game was on.
9. Watson Looks for Work
DINNER WAS OVER at the Ferrucci household. It was a crisp evening in Yorktown Heights, a New York suburb ten miles north of the IBM labs. It was dark already, and the fireplace leapt with gas-fed flames. Ferrucci’s two daughters were heading upstairs to bed. In the living room, Ferrucci and his wife, Elizabeth, recounted a deeply frustrating medical journey—one that a retrained Jeopardy computer (Dr. Watson) could have made much easier.
Ferrucci had been envisioning a role for computers in doctors’ offices since his days as a pre-med student at Manhattan College. In graduate school, he went so far as to build a medical expert system to provide advice and answer questions about cardiac and respiratory ills. It worked well, he said, but its information was limited to what he taught it. A more valuable medical aid, he said, would scoop up information from anywhere and come up with ideas and connections that no one had even thought to consider. That was the kind of machine he himself had needed.
Early in the Jeopardy