Final Jeopardy (31 page)

As he hunted for Daily Doubles, Jennings lost control of the board several times, but he was making money. He had $3,600—$800 less than Watson—when he called for the $600 clue in Breaking News. The space-gun sound rang through the auditorium. A human finally had a Daily Double. Jennings bet everything he had and then saw the clue: “Senator Obama attended the 2006 groundbreaking for this man's memorial, a half mile from Lincoln's.” Jennings paused. “I was about to say FDR,” he later admitted. But then he wondered why the
Jeopardy
writer would mention Obama before he became president, and “figured it had to be about civil rights.” And so he answered: “Who was Martin Luther King?” That was correct, and it raised Jennings's total to $7,200. By the end of the
Jeopardy
round, Jennings had $8,600. Watson trailed at $4,800, with Rutter third, at $2,400.

There was one more Double Jeopardy board in the match: thirty clues, two of them Daily Doubles, plus Final Jeopardy. Jennings's best chance on this home stretch was to double his money on the first Daily Double, double it again on the second, and again—if necessary—in Final Jeopardy. If he got to $10,000 before beginning this magical run, he could conceivably end up with $80,000. No one had ever pulled that off on
Jeopardy
—much less against the likes of Watson and Brad Rutter. The all-time single-game record in the show was Roger Craig's $77,000, and his competition had been far humbler. “I knew the odds were stacked against me,” Jennings said. “It was my only shot.”

He and Rutter both started off hunting in the high-dollar clues, but it was Watson that landed on the first Daily Double. It was the $1,200 clue in the Nonfiction category. The computer bet a conservative $2,127—and promptly botched a devilishly complex clue: “
The New Yorker
's 1959 review of this said that in its brevity and clarity it is unlike most such manuals. A book as well as a tool.” Watson, clearly mystified, said: “Let's try ‘Who is Dorothy Parker?'” (The correct response: “What is
The Elements of Style
?”)

Even without landing on a Daily Double, Jennings added to his lead. Nearing the end of the game, his winnings reached $20,000, $2,000 ahead of Watson. The second Daily Double was still on the board. Reaching $80,000 was still a possibility.

But then Jennings made a blunder that would no doubt haunt him for years to come. He had control of the board, and the only remaining category with likely Daily Double spots was Legal “E”s. Jennings was certain that it was hidden under either the $1,200 or $1,600 slot, but which one? His theory, widely accepted among
Jeopardy
aficionados, was that the game would not feature two Daily Doubles on the same board under the same dollar amount. But what was the dollar amount of that first Daily Double? Jennings seemed to recall that it was $1,600, so he asked Trebek for the $1,200 clue in Legal “E”s. It turned out he had it backward. This was a mistake that Watson, with its precise memory, would never have made. The $1,200 clue described the person who carries out the “directions and requests” in a person's will. Watson won the buzz and answered, “What is executor?” It then proceeded to the clue Jennings should have picked. The space guns went off. Watson had the last Daily Double. The researchers in the room, who understood exactly what this meant, erupted in cheers.

“At that point it was over,” Ferrucci said. “We all knew it.” The machine had triumphed. In the few clues that were left, Rutter and Jennings carried out a battle for second place. In the end, as the computer and the two humans revealed their Final Jeopardy responses to a clue about the author of
Dracula,
Bram Stoker, Jennings added a postscript on his card: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlord.”

Watson, despite a few embarrassing gaffes, appeared to be just that, at least in the domain of
Jeopardy
. It dominated both halves of the double match, reaching a total of $77,147. Jennings finished a distant second, with $24,000, just ahead of Rutter, with $21,600.

The audience filed out of the auditorium. Nighttime had fallen. The lobby, its massive Saarinen windows looking out on snow-blanketed fields, was now decked out for a feast. Waiters circulated with beer and wine, shrimp cocktails, miniature enchiladas, and tiny stalks of asparagus wrapped in steak. The home team had won and the celebration was on, with one caveat: Everyone in the festive crowd was sworn to secrecy until the televised match a month later.

Two days later, Alex Trebek was back home in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. He was unhappy about the exhibition match. His chief complaint was that IBM had unveiled one version of Watson for the practice rounds and then tweaked its strategy for the match. “I think that was wrong of IBM,” he said. “It really pissed me off.” For Trebek, the change was tantamount to upping a car's octane before a NASCAR race. “IBM didn't need to do that,” he said. “They probably would have won anyway. But they were scared.” He added that after the match was over, “I felt bad for the guys, because I felt they had been jobbed just a little.” Jennings, while disappointed, said he also had masked certain aspects of his strategy during the practice games and didn't see why Watson couldn't do the same. Rutter said that “some gamesmanship was going on. But there's nothing illegal about that.”

Ferrucci, for his part, said that during practice sessions his team was focused on the technical details of Watson's operations, making sure, for example, that it was getting the electronic feed after each clue of the correct response. Jennings and Rutter, he said, had already seen Watson hunting for Daily Doubles in the videos of the sparring rounds that they'd received months earlier. “Every respectable
Jeopardy
player knows how to hunt for them,” he added. Was Watson supposed to play dumb?

Fourteen years earlier, Garry Kasparov had registered a complaint similar to Trebek's after succumbing to Deep Blue in his epic chess match. He objected to the adjustments that the IBM engineers had made to the program in response to what they were learning about his style of play. These disagreements were rooted in questions about the role of human beings in man-machine matches. It was clear that Watson and Deep Blue were on their own as they played. But did they also need to map out their own game strategies? Was that part of the Grand Challenge? IBM in both cases would say no. Jennings and Rutter, on that Friday afternoon in Yorktown Heights, were in fact playing against an entire team of IBM researchers, and the collective intelligence of those twenty-five Ph.D.s was represented on the stage by a machine.

In that sense, it almost seemed unfair. It certainly did to Trebek, who also complained about Watson's blazing speed and precision on the buzzer. But consider the history. Only three years earlier, Blue J—as Watson was then known—fared worse on
Jeopardy
clues than an average twelve-year-old. And no one back then would have thought to complain about its buzzer reflexes, not when the machine struggled for nearly two hours to respond to a single clue. Since then, the engineers had led their computer up a spectacular learning curve—to the point where the former dullard now appeared to have an unfair advantage.

And yet Watson, for all its virtues, was still flawed. Its victory was no sure bet. Through the fall, it lost nearly one of three matches to players a notch or two below Jennings and Rutter. A couple of train wreck categories in the final game could have spelled defeat. Even late in the second game, Jennings could have stormed back. If he had won that last Daily Double, Trebek said, “he could have put significant pressure on Watson.” After the match, Jennings and Rutter stressed that the computer still had cognitive catching up to do. They both agreed that if
Jeopardy
had been a written test—a measure of knowledge, not speed—they both would have outperformed Watson. “It was its buzzer that killed us,” Rutter said.

Looking back, it was fortunate for IBM that
Jeopardy
had insisted on building a finger for Watson so that it could press the physical buzzer. This demand ten months earlier had initially irked Ferrucci, who worried that
Jeopardy
's executives would continue to call for changes in their push for a balanced match. But if Watson had beaten Jennings and Rutter to the buzz with its original (and faster) electronic signal, the match certainly would have been widely viewed as unfair— just as Harry Friedman and his team had warned all along.

Still, despite Watson's virtuosity with the buzzer and its remarkable performance on
Jeopardy
clues, the machine's education is far from complete. As this question-answering technology expands from its quiz show roots into the rest of our lives, engineers at IBM and elsewhere must sharpen its understanding of contextual language. And they will. Smarter machines will not call Toronto a U.S. city, and they will recognize the word “missing” as the salient fact in any discussion of George Eyser's leg. Watson represents merely a step in the development of smart machines. Its answering prowess, so formidable on a winter afternoon in 2011, will no doubt seem quaint in a surprisingly short time.

Two months before the match, Ken Jennings sat in the empty
Wheel of Fortune
studio on the Sony lot, thinking about a world teeming with ever-smarter computers. “It does make me a little sad that a know-it-all like me is not the public utility that he used to be,” he said. “There used to be a guy in every office, and everyone would know which cubicle you would go to find out things. ‘What's the name of the bassist in that band again?' Or ‘What's the movie where . . . ?' Or ‘Who's that guy on the TV show . . . he's got the mustache?' You always know who the guy to ask is, right?”

I knew how he felt. And it hit me harder after the match, as I made my way from the giddy reception through a long, narrow corridor toward the non-VIP parking lot. Halfway down, in an office strewn with wires and cameras, stood a discouraged Jennings and Rutter. They were waiting to be filmed for their postgame reflections. It had been a long and draining experience for them. What's more, the entire proceeding had been a tribute to the machine. Even the crowd was pulling for it. “We were the away team,” Jennings said. And in the end, the machine delivered a drubbing.

Yet I couldn't regret the outcome. I'd come to know and appreciate the other people in this drama, the ones who had devoted four years to building this computer. For them, a loss would have been even more devastating than it was for Jennings and Rutter. And unlike the two
Jeopardy
stars, the researchers had to worry about what would come next. Following a loss, there would be extraordinary pressure to fine-tune the machine for a rematch. Watson, like Deep Blue, wasn't likely to retire from the game without winning. The machine could always get smarter. This meant that instead of a deliverance from
Jeopardy,
the team might be plunged back into it. This time, though, instead of a fun and unprecedented event, it would have the grim feel of a do-or-die revenge match. For everyone concerned, it was time to move on. Ferrucci, his team, and their machine all had other horizons to explore. I did too.

But the time I spent with Watson's programmers led me to think more than ever about the programming of our own minds. Of course, we've had to adapt our knowledge and skills for millennia. Many of us have decided, somewhere along the way, that we don't need to know how to trap a bear, till a field, carry out long division, or read a map. But now, as Jennings points out, the value of knowledge itself is in flux. In a sense, each of us faces the question that IBM's
Jeopardy
team grappled with as they outfitted Watson with gigabytes of data and operating instructions. What makes sense to store up there? And what cognitive work should be farmed out to computers?

The solution, from a purely practical view, is to fine-tune the mind for the jobs and skills in which the Watsons of the world still struggle: the generation of ideas, concepts, art, and humor. Yet even in these areas, the boundaries between humans and their machines are subject to change. When Watson and its kin scour databases to come up with hypotheses, they're taking a step toward the realm of ideas. And when Watson's avatar builder, Joshua Davis, creates his works of generative art, who's to say that the computer doesn't have a hand in the design? In the end, each of us will calibrate our own blends of intelligence and creativity, looking for more help, as the years pass, from ever-smarter computers.

But just because we're living with these machines doesn't mean that we have to program ourselves by their remorseless logic. Our minds, after all, are far more than tools. In the end, some of us may choose to continue hoarding facts. We are curious animals, after all. Beyond that, one purpose of smart machines is to free us up to do the thousand and one things that only humans enjoy, from singing and swimming to falling in love. These are the opportunities that come from belonging to a species—our species—as it gets smarter. It has its upside.

A year ago, I was anxiously waiting for a response to a book proposal. I had high hopes for it, and was disappointed when my marvelous editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Amanda Cook, told me to look for another project. We'd find something better, she said. It turned out she was right. I'm thankful for her guidance in this book. She's had a clear vision for it all along. Her notes in the margins of the manuscript are snippets of pure intelligence. Not long ago I scanned one of these Amanda-infested pages and e-mailed it to a few friends just to show them how a great editor works—and how fortunate I am to have one.

I applaud the entire team at Houghton, which turned itself inside out to publish this book on a brutal schedule and to innovate with the e-book. If it had settled for the lollygagging schedule I outlined in my proposal, this book would be showing up in stores six months after Watson's televised
Jeopardy
match. Thanks to Laura Brady, Luise Erdmann, Taryn Roeder, Ayesha Mizra, Bruce Nichols, Lori Glazer, Laurie Brown, Brian Moore, Becky Saikia-Wilson, Nicola Fairhead, and all the other people at Houghton who helped produce this book in record time. Thanks also to my wonderful agent, Jim Levine, and the entire team at Levine-Greenberg.