I have to admit to being embarrassingly excited about this whole IBM Jeopardy! Challenge. It’s what in academic circles we technically refer to as a nerdgasm. Not only to I like Jeopardy!, but the entire computer science aspect behind creating a machine that can parse a written “Answer” for subtle contextual clues over a wide array of topics and efficiently generate a brief “Question” from that fascinates me.
Hell, I was so excited about the whole thing that even I forced several good-natured souls to sit with me at a sports bar to, amidst a sea of ESPN die-hards slovenly watching foot/base/basketball, watch the final day of the challenge. I even brought a petite pennant marked GO HUMANITY! and YAY BIPEDS! to cheer the puny humans on, much to the embarrassment of, well, everybody else in the place.
And, of course, at the end of the three-day contest, IBM’s supercomputer Watson handily pummeled the two greatest Jeopardy players in history. But at least it didn’t go all Kubrick on them and reduce Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and Alex Trebek to charred cinders, so that’s a start.
…’Cos it might very well have. Everything about Watson screams HAL, the homicidal supercomputer from 2001. Just consider:
- Subtract one from the letters I-B-M and you get H-A-L.
- Watson has that calm, collected Douglas Rain-y voice, just like HAL, although admittedly with the slight dialect of an automated telephone operator.
- Watson has got that same circular, (occasionally) red “eye” thing as a focal point.
- Heck, Watson even looks like that sinister black monolith thing from 2001!
Jennings himself acknowledged Watson’s ominousness. At the end of the competition, when it was clear he was about to lose to a box of blacklegging binary bits and quite possibly spend the rest of his existence asleep in The Matrix, he pleaded for mercy the only way a true nerd knows how: with a Simpsons reference.
Of course, for me, all the potential insidiousness of Watson disappeared on Day 2, at the end of (the first) Final Jeopardy. There, under the category U.S. Cities, Watson choked and answered (or is it questioned?) the clue
ITS LARGEST AIRPORT IS NAMED FOR
A WORLD WAR II HERO;
ITS SECOND LARGEST
FOR A WORLD WAR II BATTLE
with
I don’t care that he got the answer wrong; I don’t even care that he got the answer wrong by an entire country. All I care about are those five question marks…
It’s hard to fear the technological terror of any supercomputer who texts like a thirteen year old girl.
As a digression, did you notice Watson got a problem wrong, but it went unnoticed? During Day 1, under Beatles People, Watson’s response to
“BANG BANG”
HIS “SILVER HAMMER
CAME DOWN UPON
HER HEAD”
was “What is Maxwell’s silver hammer?,” when the correct response should have been “Who is Maxwell?” After all, it’s wasn’t Maxwell’s silver hammer’s silver hammer that came down upon her head.
That show show fixed, man. Humanity got robbed.
