Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [89]
This would represent a turnaround. For more than a decade, the world’s Web surfers have learned to hone their queries. In effect, they’ve used their human smarts to reverse-engineer Google’s algorithms—and to understand how a search engine “thinks.” Each word summons a universe of connections. Looking at each one like a circle in a Venn diagram, the goal is to organize three or four words—3.5 is the global average—whose circles have the smallest possible overlap. For many, this analysis has become almost reflexive. Yet as the computer gets smarter, these sophisticated users stand to get poorer results than those who type long sentences, even paragraphs, and treat the computer as if it were human.
And many of the computer systems showing up in our lives will have a far more human touch than Watson. In fact, some of the most brilliant minds in AI are focusing on engineering systems whose very purpose is to leech intelligence from people. Luis Von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, is perhaps the world’s leader in this field. As he explains it, “For the first time in history, we can get one hundred or two hundred million people all working on a project together. If we can use their brains for even ten or fifteen seconds, we can create lots of value.” To this end, he has dreamed up online games to attract what he calls brain cycles. In one of them, the ESP game, two Web surfers who don’t know each other are shown an image. If they type in the same word to describe it, another image pops up. They race ahead, trying to match descriptions and finish fifteen images in two and a half minutes. While they play, they’re tagging photographs with metadata, a job that computers have not yet mastered. This dab of human intelligence enables search engines to find images. Von Ahn licensed the technology to Google in 2006. Another of his innovations, ReCaptcha, presents squiggly words to readers, who fill them in to enter Web sites or complete online purchases. By typing the distorted letters, they prove they’re human (and not spam engines). This is where the genius comes in. The ReCaptchas are drawn from the old books in libraries. By completing them, the humans are helping, word by crooked word, to digitize world literature, making it accessible to computers (and to Google, which bought the technology in 2009).
This type of blend is likely to become the rule as smarter computers spread into the marketplace. It makes sense. A computer like Watson, after all, is an exotic beast, one developed at great cost to play humans in a game. The segregated scene on the Jeopardy stage, the machine separated from the two men, is in fact a contrivance. The question-answering contraptions that march into the economy, Watson’s offspring and competitors alike, will be operating under an entirely different rubric: What works and at what cost? The winners, whether they’re hunting for diseases or puzzling out marketing campaigns, will master different blends. They’ll figure out how to turbocharge thinking machines with a touch of human smarts and, at the same time, to augment human reasoning with the speed and range of machines. Each side has towering strengths and glaring vulnerabilities. That’s what gives the Jeopardy match its appeal. But outside the Jeopardy studio, stand-alones make little sense.
10. How to Play the Game
THE TIME FOR BIG fixes was over. As the forest down the hill from the Yorktown lab took on its first dabs of yellow and red, researchers were putting the finishing touches on the question-answering machine. On the morning of September 10, 2010, five champion Jeopardy players walked into the Yorktown labs to take on a revamped and invigorated Watson. IBM’s PR agency, Ogilvy, had a film crew in the studio