Stephen Baker, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
268 pages, $24
Plenty of observers have weighed in on Watson, the computer that International Business Machines Corp. built and programmed to play the quiz show "Jeopardy!" Few have done it better than Stephen Baker, author of "Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything."
Baker got behind the scenes at IBM to watch a team of scientists and engineers develop the machine. Adding to the challenge was one of the computer's flesh- and-blood opponents: Ken Jennings, the Joe DiMaggio of "Jeopardy!" who won a record 74 straight matches.
David Ferrucci, the chief scientist on the team that developed Watson -- named for IBM's founder -- understood that no matter how fast the machine was, or how many facts they crammed into its database, humans like Jennings still possessed skills no one had been able to engineer with much success.
"Any 'Jeopardy' machine they built would struggle mightily to master language and common sense -- areas that come as naturally to humans as breathing," Baker writes. "On the positive side, it wouldn't suffer from nerves."
On a more mundane level, IBM and the producers of the show were concerned about image. IBM's Deep Blue had triumphed over chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997, but chess is not "Jeopardy!" and chess tournaments in the United States don't attract 9 million viewers a night. Any failure by Watson could damage the brand.
"Jeopardy!" had its own concerns. The producers couldn't be seen as rigging the game for or against the machine, but they also couldn't allow the lightning-quick Watson to buzz in on every clue, steamrolling his human rivals.
The tournament itself was taped in January and aired last week. Watson's strengths and flaws were manifest. Puns and wordplay stumped it (including a category devoted, ironically, to words found on a computer keyboard), while it excelled at more straightforward trivia such as Beatles lyrics.
Baker's last chapter gives details of the broadcast not apparent to the TV audience, including judgment calls and equipment malfunctions (by the game board, not Watson).
