Final Jeopardy Read Online Free

beginning, Ferrucci saw that the game required far more than the simple regurgitation of facts. It involved strategy, decision making, pattern recognition, and a knack for nuance in the language of the clues. As the computer grew from a whimsical idea into a
Jeopardy
behemoth, it underwent an entire education, triumphing in some areas, floundering in others. Its struggles, whether in untangling language or grappling with abstract ideas, highlighted the areas in which humans maintain an edge. It is in the story of Watson’s development that we catch a glimpse of the future of human as well as machine intelligence.
    The secret is wrapped up in the nature of knowledge itself. What is it? For humans, knowledge is an entire universe, a welter of sensations and memories, desires, facts, skills, songs and images, words, hopes, fears, and regrets, not to mention love. But for those hoping to build intelligent machines, it has to be simpler. Broadly speaking, it falls into three categories: sensory input, ideas, and symbols. Consider the color blue. Sensory perception is the raw material of knowledge. It’s something that computers and people alike can perceive, each in their own fashion. Now think of the word “sky.” Those three letters are a symbol for the biggest piece of blue in our world. Computers can handle such symbols. They can find references to “sky” in documents and, when programmed, correlate it with others, such as “blue,” “clouds,” and “heaven.” A computer can master both sensory data and symbols. It can count, categorize, search, and store them. But how about this snippet from Lord Byron: “Friendship is love without his wings.” That sentence represents the third realm of knowledge: ideas. How can a machine make sense of them? In these early years of the twenty-first century, ideas remain the dominion of people—and the frontier for thinking machines.
    David Ferrucci’s mission was to explore that frontier. Like many in his profession, Ferrucci grew up watching
Star Trek
on television. The characters on the show, humans and pointy-eared Vulcans alike, spoke to their computer as if it were one of them. No formatting was necessary, no key words, no programming language. They spoke English. The computer understood the meaning and context of the questions. It consulted vast databases and came back with an immediate answer. True, it might not produce original ideas. But it was an extravagantly well-informed shipmate. That was the computer Ferrucci wanted to build.
    As he served the last drops of his wine, Ferrucci was talking about the world he was busy creating, one in which people and their machines often appeared to switch roles. He didn’t know, he said, whether engineers would ever be able to “create a sentient being.” But when he looked at his fellow humans through the eyes of a computer scientist, he saw patterns of behaviors that often appeared to be programmed. He mentioned the zombielike commutes, the retreat to the same chair, the hand reaching for the TV remote, and the near-identical routines, from toothbrushing to feeding the animals. “It’s more interesting,” he said, “when humans delve inside themselves and say, ‘Why am I doing this? And why is it relevant and important to be human?’” His machine would nudge people toward that line of inquiry. Even with an avatar for a face and a robotic voice, the
Jeopardy
machine would invite comparisons to the other two contestants on the stage. This was inevitable. And whether it won or lost on a winter evening in 2011, the computer might lead millions of spectators to reflect on the nature, and probe the potential, of their own humanity.

1. The Germ of the
Jeopardy
Machine
    THE
JEOPARDY
MACHINE’S birthplace—if a computer can stake such a claim—was the sprawling headquarters of the global research division named after its