Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [97]
“That would really look bad for us,” Tesauro said. Perhaps it would be better to sacrifice a win or two out of a hundred and protect Watson a bit more from prime-time catastrophe. It wasn’t clear. The strategy team continued to crunch numbers.
The numbers flowing in from the real matches, where Watson was playing flesh-and-blood humans, were improving. Through the autumn season, the newer, smarter Watson powered its way past scores of Jeopardy champions. It won nearly 70 percent of its matches; its betting was bolder, its responses more assured. It still crashed from time to time, of course, and routinely made crazy mistakes. On one Daily Double, it was asked to name the company that in 2002 “came out with a product line featuring 2-line Maya Angelou poems.” Watson missed the answer (“What is Hallmark?”) and appeared to pay tribute to its creators, responding: “What is IBM?”
Watson’s greatest weakness was in Final Jeopardy. According to the statistics, after the first sixty clues, Watson was leading an astounding 91 percent on the games. Yet that final clue, with its more difficult wording and complex wagering dynamics, lowered its winning percentage to 67 percent. Final Jeopardy turned Watson from a winner to a loser in one-quarter of the games. This was its vulnerability going into the match, and it would no doubt rise against the likes of Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The average human got Final Jeopardy right about half the time, according to Gondek. Watson hovered just below 50 percent. Ken Jennings, by contrast, aced Final Jeopardy clues at a 68 percent rate. That didn’t bode well for the machine.
Brad Rutter, undefeated in his Jeopardy career, walked into the cavernous Wheel of Fortune studio. It was mid-November, just two months before he and Ken Jennings would take on Watson. Rutter, thirty-two, is thin and energetic, with sharply chiseled features. His close-cut black beard gives him the look of a vacationing television star. This is appropriate, since he recently moved from his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to L.A.’s Beechwood Canyon, right under the famous Hollywood sign. He’s trying to make it as an actor.
On this autumn day, Rutter and Jennings were having their orientation for the upcoming match. They were shuttling back and forth between meetings in the Robert Young Building and interviews in the empty Wheel of Fortune studio. Rutter, clearly fascinated by television, spotted a rack of men’s suits by the stage. “Are those Pat Sajak’s?” he asked, referring to the longtime Wheel of Fortune host. Told that they were, he went over to check the labels. For years, the show announced every evening that Sajak’s wardrobe was provided by Perry Ellis. Rutter, a stickler for facts, wanted to make sure it was true. It was.
The previous evening, Rutter had been given a Blu-ray Disc featuring five of Watson’s sparring rounds. He studied them closely. He noticed right away that Watson hopped around the board, apparently hunting for Daily Doubles. He also focused on Watson’s buzzer speed and was relieved to see that humans often managed to beat the machine. This was crucial for Rutter, who viewed speed as his greatest advantage. He said he was no expert on computers and had only a vague idea of how Watson worked. But he had expected the IBM team to give Watson an intricate timing program to anticipate the buzz. (This was a frightfully complex option that Ferrucci had decided not to pursue.) “That scared me,” Rutter said.
Rutter’s speed is legendary. It fueled his 16-0 record on Jeopardy, including his decisive victories over Jennings. It was such an advantage that IBM’s Gondek referred to Rutter as “Jennings Kryptonite.” Rutter said he wasn’t sure what made his thumb so fast, but he had a theory. “I used to play a lot on the Nintendo entertainment system when I was a kid,” he said. “And if you played Super Mario Brothers or Metroid, you had