Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [98]
But Rutter boasted strengths beyond mere speed. In a Tournament of Champions match that aired in May 2005, he found himself in a most unusual position—third place—heading into Final Jeopardy. The category was People and Places, and the clue: “This Mediterranean island shares a name with President Garfield’s nickname for his wife.”
“I started scanning Mediterranean islands,” Rutter said. “OK. Sardinia? No. Corsica? No. Sicily? No. Menorca? Mallorca? Malta?” He figured, “Malta could be a girl’s name,” and wrote it down. But he knew it was wrong. As the theme music played, he continued to think of islands. Lesbos, Rhodes, Ibiza . . . “With about five seconds left,” he said, “I got to Crete.” All at once the pieces came together. “Crete could be short for Lucretia. That’s a very nineteenth-century name. And then it was an apparition in my head. I’d looked at a list of First Ladies, and somehow Lucretia Garfield popped out at me. I can’t explain it. So I scribbled down Crete. It was barely legible. I was the only one to get it right, and I ended up winning by a dollar.”
A timely spark of human brilliance had saved him. It featured a series of insights and connections Watson would be hard-pressed to match. Indeed, in the coming showdown, Rutter’s competition on that type of clue was more likely to come from the other human on the stage. This led to a question: Was it fair that the two humans had to battle each other in addition to the machine? Mightn’t it be easier for one player to face two machines?
Rutter thought so. “I’ve seen Ken play seventy-four matches,” he said. “I know his strengths and weaknesses pretty well. They’re different than Watson’s. So when I’m picking different categories or clues off the board, who do I attack? Whose weaknesses do I try to get to? That’s a tough question. I haven’t really figured it out yet. I’m going to be thinking about it a lot.”
Jennings, sitting in the same studio, elaborated on the point. “I don’t mean it to sound like I’m making excuses already,” he said, “but there is some inherent disadvantage that there are two humans and one Watson.” The way he saw it, Watson’s algorithms would master “a certain percentage of the Jeopardy canon.” And if the computer was fast on the buzzer, it would dominate in those areas. That left two players to battle over the clues “that only humans can do.”
The thirty-six-year-old Jennings, with his featherweight build, is far smaller than Rutter. He has an easy laugh and a self-effacing style. He hadn’t yet found a Blu-ray player, he said, to watch the video of Watson in action. But he had clearly been reading everything he could find about the computer, including technical articles. Jennings double-majored in computer science and English at Brigham Young University and later worked as a computer programmer in Salt Lake City. When he heard about the match against Watson, he said, it excited him. “I said, ‘Wow, we get to see if a computer can play Jeopardy,’” he said. “I was more interested in the geeky part.”
As Jennings studied up on Watson’s algorithms and its massive parallel processing, he couldn’t help comparing the computer to his own mind. “Many of the tricks that I used in Jeopardy are things that I read Watson does,” he said.
He gave an example. One Jeopardy clue asked for the name of two of Jesus’ disciples whose names are both top-ten baby male names and end in the same letter. “I remember thinking,” he said, “that that’s not the kind of thing you can know. The only way to do it is to break it down, make a list, do the Venn diagram of it. And I come to find out that Watson does exactly that. It’s very good at decomposing questions, so it does the two fact sets in parallel. Then it does the Venn diagram to see if there’s anything on both lists.” Jennings paused for a moment, then said, “Matthew