Final Jeopardy Read Free Page A

diagnoses, for each patient’s ills. It could also direct doctors toward the evidence it had considered and provide its reasoning. The machine, lacking common sense, would be far from perfect. Just as the
Jeopardy
computer was certain to botch a fair number of clues, the diagnoses coming from a digital Dr. House would sometimes be silly. So people would still run the show, but they’d be assisted by a powerful analytical tool.
    In those early days, only a handful of researchers took part in the
Jeopardy
project at IBM. They could fit easily into Ferrucci’s office at the research center in Hawthorne, New York, about thirty-five miles north of New York City (and a fifteen-minute drive from corporate headquarters, in Armonk). But to build a knowledge machine, Ferrucci knew, would require extensive research and development. In a sense, a
Jeopardy
machine would represent an entire section of the human brain. To build it, he would need specialists in many aspects of cognition. Some would be experts in language, others in the retrieval of information. Some would attempt to program the machine with judgment, writing algorithms to steer it toward answers. Others would guide it in so-called machine learning, so that it could train itself to pick the most statistically promising combinations of words and pay more attention to trustworthy sources. Experts in hardware, meanwhile, would have to build a massive computer, or a network of them, to process all of this work. Assembling these efforts on a three-year timetable amounted to a daunting management challenge. The cost of failure would be humiliation, for both the researchers and their company.
    Other complications came from the West Coast, specifically the Robert Young building on the Sony lot in Culver City, a neighborhood just south of Hollywood. Unlike chess, a treasure we all share, the
Jeopardy
franchise belonged to Sony Pictures Entertainment, an arm of the Japanese consumer electronics giant. The
Jeopardy
executives, led by a canny negotiator named Harry Friedman, weren’t about to let IBM use their golden franchise and their millions of viewers on its own terms. Over the years, the two companies jousted over the terms of the game, the placement of logos, access to stars such as Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and the writing of
Jeopardy
clues. They even haggled over the computer’s speed on the buzzer and whether IBM should take measures to slow it to a human level. These disagreements echoed until the eve of the match. At one point, only months before the showdown,
Jeopardy
’s executives appeared to be on the verge of pulling the plug on the entire venture. That would have left IBM’s answering computer, the product of three intense years of research, scrounging for another game to play. This particular disagreement was resolved. But the often conflicting dictates of promotion, branding, science, and entertainment forged a fragile and uneasy alliance.

    The
Jeopardy
project also faced harsh critics within IBM’s own scientific community. This was to be expected in a field—Artificial Intelligence—where the different beliefs about knowledge, intelligence, and the primacy of the human brain bordered on the theological. How could there be any consensus in a discipline so vast? While researchers in one lab laboriously taught machines the various meanings of the verb “to do,” futurists just down the hall insisted that computers would outrace human intelligence in a couple of decades, controlling the species. Beyond its myriad approaches and outlooks, the field could be divided into two camps, idealists and pragmatists. The idealists debated the nature of intelligence and aspired to build computers that could think conceptually, like human beings, perhaps surpassing us. The pragmatists created machines to carry out tasks. Ferrucci, who had promised to have a television-ready computer by early 2011, fell firmly into the second