Final Jeopardy by Stephen Baker Page B

to do something memorable. “We could sit here writing papers for the next five years,” he said, “or we build an entirely new type of computer.” He introduced, briefly, a nugget of realpolitik
.
There would be no other opportunities for them in Q-A technologies within IBM. He had effectively engineered a land grab, putting every related resource into his
Jeopardy
ecosystem. If they wanted to do this kind of science, he said, “this was the only place to be.”
    Then he went around the room with a simple question: “Are you in or are you out?”
    One by one, the researchers said yes. But their response was not encouraging. The consensus was that they could build a machine that could compete—but probably not beat—a human champion. “We thought it could earn positive money before getting to Final Jeopardy,” said Chu-Carroll, one of the only holdovers on Ferrucci’s team from the old TRec unit. “At least we wouldn’t be kicked off the stage.”
    With this less than ringing endorsement, Ferrucci sent word to Paul Horn that the
Jeopardy
challenge was on. He promised to have a machine, within twenty-four months, that could compete against average human players. Within thirty-six to forty-eight months, his machine, he said, would beat champions one-quarter of the time. And within five to seven years, the
Jeopardy
machine would be “virtually unbeatable.” He added that this final goal might not be worth pursuing. “It is more useful,” he said, “to create a system that is less than perfect but easily adapted to new areas.” A week later, Ferrucci and a small team from IBM Research flew to Culver City, to the Robert Young Building on the Sony lot. There they’d see whether Harry Friedman would agree to let the yet-to-be-built Blue J play
Jeopardy
on national television.

4. Educating Blue J
    JENNIFER CHU-CARROLL , sitting amid a clutter of hardware and piles of paper in her first-floor office in the Hawthorne labs, wondered what in the world to teach Blue J. How much of the Bible would it have to know? The Holy Book popped up in hundreds of
Jeopardy
clues. But did that mean the computer needed to know every psalm, the laws of Deuteronomy, Jonah’s thoughts and prayers while inside the whale? Would a dose of Dostoevsky help? She could feed it
The Idiot,
Crime and Punishment,
or any of the other classics that might pop up in a
Jeopardy
clue. When it came to traditional book knowledge, feeding Blue J’s brain was nearly as easy as Web surfing.
    This was in July 2007. Chu-Carroll’s boss, David Ferrucci, and the small IBM contingent had just flown back from Culver City, where they had been given a provisional thumbs-up from Harry Friedman. A man-machine match would take place, perhaps in late 2010 or early 2011. IBM needed the deadline to mobilize the effort within the company and to establish it as a commitment, not just a vague possibility.
Jeopardy
, for its part, would bend the format a bit for the machine. The games would not include audio or visual clues, where contestants have to watch a snippet of video or recognize a bar of music. And they might let the machine buzz electronically instead of hitting a physical button. The onus, according to the preliminary agreement, was on IBM to come up with a viable player in time for the match.
    It was up to Chu-Carroll and a few of her colleagues to map out the machine’s reading curriculum. Chu-Carroll had black bangs down to her eyes and often wore sweatshirts and jeans. Like practically everyone else on the team, she had a doctorate in computer science, hers from the University of Delaware. She had worked for five years at Lucent Technology’s Bell Labs, in New Jersey. There she taught machines how to participate in a dialogue and how to modulate their voices to communicate different signals. (Lucent was developing automated call centers.) When Chu-Carroll came to IBM in