Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [88]
The Pennsylvania Canal faced one imposing obstacle: the Alleghenies. These so-called mountains were smaller and rounder than the Rockies or Alps, but they posed a vertical challenge for canal designers. Somehow the boats would have to cross from one side to the other. So with engineering far more ambitious than anything the New Yorkers had attempted, the Pennsylvanians constructed a complex series of iron-railed ramps and tunnels. This horse-powered system would hoist the boats back and forth over the hills and, in a few places, through them. By 1834, boats crossing the state left the water for a thirty-six-mile cross-country trek, or portage, which lifted them up fourteen thousand feet and back down again. For the criss-crossing on ramps, the boats had to be coupled and uncoupled thirty-three times. For those of us not accustomed to Conestoga wagons, this would seem excruciatingly slow, even after stationary steam engines replaced the horses. The novelist Charles Dickens made the crossing in 1842. He set off on a boat and found himself, in short order, peering down a mountain cliff. “Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of the giddy precipice and looking down from the carriage window,” he wrote, “the traveler gazes sheer down without a stone or scrap of fence between into the mountain depths below.” Dickens wouldn’t soon forget Pennsylvania’s $10 million innovation.
This canal project used current technology and heroic engineering to carry out work on a tight deadline. Would newer technology supplant it? It was always possible. After all, the Industrial Revolution was raging in Britain and making inroads into America. Things were changing quickly, which was precisely why Pennsylvania could not afford to wait. As it turned out, within a decade steam-powered trains rendered the canal obsolete. Yet the project laid out the vision and preliminary engineering for the next generation of transport. The train route over the Alleghenies, which followed much of the same path, was considered so vital to national security that Union soldiers kept guard over it during the Civil War. And in 1942, as part of the failed Operation Pastorius, Nazi agents targeted it for sabotage.
Will Watson be the platform for the next stage of computing or, like the Pennsylvania Canal, a bold and startling curiosity to be picked over, its pieces going into cheaper and more efficient technologies down the road? The answer may depend in part on IBM’s rivals.
Google is the natural competitor, but it comes at the problem from an entirely different angle. While IBM builds a machine to grapple with one question at a time, Google is serving much of networked humanity. Electricity is a major expense, and even a small increase of wattage per query could put a dent in its profits. This means that even as Google increasingly looks to respond to queries with concrete answers, it can devote to each one only one billionth the processing power of Watson, or less. Peter Norvig, the research director, said that Google’s big investments in natural language and machine translation would lead the company toward more sophisticated question-answering for its mass market. As its search engine improves its language skills, he said, it will be able to carry out smarter hunts and make better sense of its users’ queries. The danger for IBM isn’t head-to-head competition from Google and other search engines. But as searching comes closer to providing answers to queries in English, a number of tech startups and consultants will be able to jury-rig competing question-answering machines, much the way James Fan built his Basement Baseline at the dawn of the Jeopardy project.
As Google evolves, Norvig said, it will start to replicate some of Watson’s headier maneuvers, combining data from different sources. “If someone wants per capita income in a certain country, or in a list of countries,