Overview
The thrilling story of the computer that can play Jeopardy! Alex Trebek: Meet Watson.
For centuries, people have dreamed of creating a machine that thinks like a human. Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought — one that doesn’t just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant Web page, but understands us and gives us what we need.
That vision has driven a team of engineers at IBM. Over three years, they created “Watson” and prepared it for a showdown on Jeopardy!, where it would take on two of the game’s all-time champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a nationally televised event. Final Jeopardy is the entertaining, illuminating story of that computer and that epic match.
It’s a classic tale of Man vs. Machine. Like its human competitors, Watson has to understand language, including puns and irony, and master everything from history, literature, and science to arts, entertainment, and game strategy. After years of training, Watson can find the scrambled state capital in “Hair Gel” (“What is Raleigh?”) and even come up with the facial accessory that made Moshe Dayan recognizable worldwide (“What is an eye patch?”). Watson may just be the smartest machine on earth.
Final Jeopardy traces the arc of Watson’s “life,” from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson’s eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We gain access to Ferrucci’s War Room, where the IBM team works tirelessly to boost Watson’s speed to the buzzer, improve its performance in “train wreck” categories (such as “Books in Español”), and fix glitches like the speech defect Watson developed during its testing phase, when it started adding a d to words ending in n (“What is Pakistand?”).
Much is at stake, especially for IBM. A new generation of Watsons could transform medicine, the law, marketing, even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses.
Showdown aside, it’s clear that the future has arrived. But with it come questions: Where does it leave humans? What will Watson’s heirs be capable of in ten or twenty years? Is it time to declare defeat in the realm of facts? What should we teach our children? And what should we carry around in our own heads?
Final Jeopardy takes on these questions and more in a narrative that’s as fast and fun as the game itself. Baker shows us how smart machines will fit into our world — and how they’ll disrupt it.
www.finaljeopardy.net
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
In 1997, the Deep Blue computer made front-page headlines worldwide when it defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In mid-February, IBM's Watson artificial intelligence software took on an even more complex challenge, competing on three Jeopardy! episodes against Brad Rutter, the current biggest all-time money winner, and championship streak record holder Ken Jennings. Final Jeopardy the book was finished before that historic face-off, but its subject matter is far more fascinating than any mere game reprise because it provides the behind-the-scenes story of Watson's development into an omnivorous fact-finder.
Publishers Weekly
Forget chess—a television game show is the ultimate test of a thinking machine. Former Business Week technology writer Baker (The Numerati) delivers a sprightly account of IBM's quest to create a computer program, dubbed Watson, that can win at Jeopardy. Baker deftly explores the immense challenge that Jeopardy-style "question answering" poses to a computer, which must comprehend the nuances, obscurities, and puns of natural language and master everything from Sumerian history to Superbowl winners. Watson is both an information-processing juggernaut, searching millions of documents per second, and a child-like naïf with odd speech impediments that thinks the Al in Alcoa stands for Al Capone (one embarrassing gaffe in a practice match prompted programmers to install a profanity filter). Like a cross between Born Yesterday and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Baker's narrative is both charming and terrifying; as Watson's intelligence relentlessly increases, we envision whole job sectors, from call center operators and marketing analysts to, well, quiz-show contestants, vanishing overnight. The result is an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence—and a sobering glimpse of things to come. The book's final chapter, covering the actual games, which will air in mid-February, was not seen by PW. (Feb. 17)From the Publisher
"The book is the place to go if you're really interested in this version of the quest for creating Artificial Intelligence (AI)....lively" -Seattle Times"Baker skillfully weaves the two threads of the story together, and the book contains many passages that make the reader not only assess what they think but how they think, and how they have absorbed and stored the knowledge they possess. It’s books like this that remind us there is still so much we don’t understand about our own brains, and that the journey of discovery has only just begun." -Culture Mob
"Baker's narrative is both charming and terrifying...an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence - and a sobering glimpse of things to come." -STARRED, Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
In February 2011, the world watched as a computer named Watson handily beat the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time. The contest was reminiscent of when IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, but Jeopardy was a much more difficult game for a computer to master. Although Baker (The Numerati) reviews the match in his last chapter, his primary focus here is on the compelling story of Watson's creation and education. When IBM organized a team of artificial intelligence experts to make a computer that could play Jeopardy, many were skeptical. How could a computer be taught to analyze the complex clues given in the game and formulate the right answer (or question, in this case)? Would puns and innuendos be recognized by a computer? Baker also reviews the current state of artificial intelligence. VERDICT Recommended for all libraries. This is a thought-provoking view of one of IBM's major contributions to the computing field.—William Baer, Georgia Inst. of Technology Lib., AtlantaKirkus Reviews
Are you ready for machines to take over the world? How about just a game show to start with?
That's just the scenario ofBusinessWeek senior technology writer Baker's (The Numerati, 2008) account of the difficult birth of Watson, the IBM computer that just won a championship round on Jeopardy. Cleverly, the author's narrative works regardless of the outcome—for either way, the setup is the same: After the birth of Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a game of chess in 1997, IBM scientists set about building another machine. This one, like all machines, basically knows nothing—but, intriguingly, can approximate thought all the same. Imagine, as Baker describes it, how we might parse this clue: "This facial ware made Israel's Moshe Dayan instantly recognizable worldwide." You'd have to know something about who Dayan was and probably have been around in the day when the monocular Yul Brynner look-alike walked the earth, whereas Watson would merely go through millions of iterations of binary data by way of a process that, as Baker notes, is "scandalously wasteful of computing resources" to arrive at the correct answer: eyepatch. Scandalously wasteful, perhaps. But imagine a few generations down the line, when Watson will have spawned machines that, to name just one real-world application, can store the texts of every medical-journal article ever written—weighing the newer ones more favorably than those from, say, Victorian England—to aid diagnosticians in their work. But how to get the machine to be able to parse real-world data and skirt the shoals of puns, subtleties, metaphors and all the other tricks human language allows? There's the rub, and Baker provides a fine, often entertaining account of the false steps that led Watson, ever the literalist, to read Malcolm X as "Malcolm Ten" and to confuse Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist with the Pet Shop Boys.
Like Tracy Kidder'sSoul of a New Machine (1981), Baker's book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It's an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too.