Spoilers for last night’s Jeopardy IBM Challenge coming up:
We can console ourselves with this: when our new computer masters take over, apparently very soon now, we can be assured that they will comprehend our pathetic natural-language pleas for mercy with a certainty of upward of 90%.
Monday night, Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer, ended play tied for the lead with Brad Rutter. By the end of last night, at the end of a full game, he was dominating humanity. And arguably, the round wasn’t even as close as it looked. Watson ran the board uninterrupted, to the point where Alex Trebek answered “Yes!” in seeming irritation at Watson’s monotonous dominance. (The one set of human winners in all this: IBM, which is reaping minute after minute of in-show advertising from its investment.)
It is time to start looking for excuses, mankind, and one of the leading contenders could be: the buzz factor. If one assumes all three players know most of the answers (too bad we don’t have a graphic of the answers in Ken Jennings’ and Rutter’s heads, like Watson’s), then it might have made sense to make the questions (or “answers”) harder. I don’t know the exact details of Watson’s mechanism, but it seemed to click in with the efficiency of a Cylon Centurion.
And yet I can’t help but like Watson. It again landed every Daily Double, and though it didn’t ballsily bet the maximum as it did Monday, it made proportionally smaller bets with mathematic precision: $6435 and $1246. Was Watson just taunting us? Or does this tell us something about its wagering algorithm? (Why the smaller bet on the second double? Does Watson calculate how confident it feels about a given category? Or does it lower its bet when it has a bigger lead—or on the second of two Daily Doubles—because it’s less mathematically likely to be caught?)
Mankind did gain some ground in Final Jeopardy, as Jennings and Rutter guessed “Chicago” correctly to Watson’s “Toronto”—but the wily machine wagered only $947. ($947! Wednesday, mark my words, Watson will make a wager that goes to hundreds of decimal places, and will make Alex cry.)
Enjoy your last day of freedom, mortals, because with second-place Rutter over $25,000 in the hole,* it looks like there’s little that can save humanity on night three. Unless we cheat. It may be the only advantage we still have on the machines. Somebody spill Coke on that thing, quick!
*Sidebar: whom do you think Jennings wants to beat more, Watson or Rutter? I’m guessing Rutter.