Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [99]
Jennings reflected on traveling across the country, to IBM’s lab in Yorktown, to take on Rutter and Watson. “It’s a little different to be the road team,” he said. “I’m not playing in the familiar studio where I have the muscle memory and the good times and the million-dollar check. I’m picturing a very sterile lab from the fifties, people running around in white coats. . . .”
Jennings had been following Watson’s record against its sparring partners, and the trend looked worrisome. In the beginning of the matches, he said, Watson was winning 64 percent of the time against standard Jeopardy players. “Now they’ve fine-tuned it, and it’s 67 percent against Tournament of Champions players. I know it can still be beat,” he said. “But I think to myself: Could I win 67 percent of my games against Tournament of Champions players? That’s not something I’ve ever done. I rattled off a very long streak, but it was against rookie players.” He said that he was going into the match feeling, for the first time, like an underdog.
Jennings is well known for his disarming modesty. In previous games, it could be argued, it may have benefited him as a psychological tactic. Rivals encountered a likable and unassuming young man who seemed almost surprised at his own success. By the time they looked at the scoreboard, he was annihilating them.
Such tactics wouldn’t mean much in the coming showdown. Jennings and Rutter would be facing a foe impervious to nerves and psychological maneuvering. And while millions tuned in to what promised to be an epic knowledge battle between two men and a thinking machine, the drama would leave Watson unmoved. The machine, unlike everyone else, had no stake in the outcome.
11. The Match
DAVID FERRUCCI HAD driven the same stretch hundreds of times from his suburban home to IBM’s Yorktown labs, or a bit farther to Hawthorne. For fifteen or twenty minutes along the Taconic Parkway he went over his endless to-do list. How could his team boost Watson’s fact-checking in Final Jeopardy? Could any fix ensure that the machine’s bizarre speech defect would never return? Was the pun-detection algorithm performing up to par? There were always more details, plenty to fuel both perfectionism and paranoia—and Ferrucci had a healthy measure of both.
But this January morning was different. As he drove past frozen fields and forests, the pine trees heavy with fresh snow, all of his lists were history. After four years, his team’s work was over. Within hours, Watson alone would be facing Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, with Ferrucci and the machine’s other human trainers reduced to spectators. Ferrucci felt his eyes well up. “My whole team would be judged by this one game,” he said later. “That’s what killed me.”
The day before, at a jam-packed press conference, IBM had unveiled Watson to the world. The event took place on a glittering new Jeopardy set mounted over the previous two weeks by an army of nearly a hundred workers. It resembled the set in Culver City: the same jumbo game board to the left, the contestants’ lecterns to the right, with Alex Trebek’s podium in the middle. In front was a long table for the Jeopardy officials, where Harry Friedman would sit, Rocky Schmidt at his side, followed by a line of writers and judges, all of them with monitors, phones, and a pile of old-fashioned reference books. Every piece was in place. But this East Coast version was plastered with IBM branding. The shimmering blue wall bore the company’s historic slogan, Think, in a number of languages. Stretched across the shiny black floor was a logo that looked at first like Batman’s emblem. But closer study revealed the planet Earth, with each of the continents bulging, as if painted by Fernando Botero. This was Chubby Planet, the symbol of IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign and the model for Watson’s avatar. In the negotiations with Jeopardy over the past two years, IBM