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Well before Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter , IBM ’s purpose team grappled with a different challenge – getting mystify to the punch by someone else inventing a trivia - savvy artificial mind . net Jeopardy discusses Watson ’s early development and how this Q&A juggernaut surmount the “ Basement Baseline . ”

In the early days of 2007 , before he agreed to head up a Jeopardy project , IBM ’s David Ferrucci harbored two conflicting fear . The first of his nightmare scenarios was utterly natural : A Jeopardy figurer would fail , abash the society and his team .

But his second fear , failure ’s diabolical twin , was perhaps even more terrifying . What if IBM spend tens of millions of dollars and devoted one C of research worker years to this labor , play it up in the public press , and then saw someone drum them to it ? Ferrucci pictured a lone hacker in a garage , cobble together liberal software from the WWW and perchance hitching it to Wikipedia and other online database . What if the Jeopardy challenge deform out to be not too toilsome but too promiscuous ?

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That would be worse , far worse , than unsuccessful person . IBM would become the stooge of the tech world , an old - line company completely out of touch with the technology revolution – precisely what its incorporated customers paid it billions of clam to pass over . Ferrucci ’s first order of job was to verify that this could never happen . “ It was due software , ” he later said .

So on a February mean solar day in 2007 , James Fan set out to programme a Q - A automobile from scratch . He embark on by drawing up an inventory of the computer software tool and reference document he think he ’d need . First would be a so - called eccentric arrangement . This would aid the computer figure out if it was looking for a mortal , place , fauna , or thing . After all , if it did n’t make love what it was looking for , finding an answer was little more than a crap - shoot ; generating enough “ self-assurance ” to wager on that solution would be unsufferable . For humans , distinguishing President George Washington from the bridge deck name after him is n’t much of a challenge . Context makes it cleared . bridge circuit do n’t deliver inaugural addresses ; presidents are seldom occlude at rush time of day , with half - hour delays from Jersey . What ’s more , when placed in sentences , people usually conduct differently than route or bridges .

But what ’s simple for us involved hard workplace for Fan ’s Q - A calculator . It had to comb through the body structure of the doubt , picking out the subjects , objects , and prepositions . Then it had to consult exhaustive reference list that had been built up in the industry over decades , laying out hundreds of yard of places , thing , and actions and the World Wide Web of relationships among them . These were cognize as “ ontology . ” conceive of them as swindle sheet for electronic computer . If a digit was a subject area , for model , it fell into human anatomy and was related to the hand and the thumb and to verb such as “ to signal ” and “ to deplumate . ” ( Conversely , when “ the finger ” turn up as the objective of the verb “ to give , ” a sophisticated ontology might steer the figurer toward the neighborhood of insults , gesture , and obscenities . )

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A good human Jeopardy player would see past the unbalanced phrase structure , quickly recognizing the curt tale as one write by Franz Kafka , along with a reference to Kafka ’s Czech nationality and his longtime associate Max Brod . In the same way , a search engine would zero in on those helpful key words and pay scant attention to the sentence surround them . When Fan typed the cue into Google , the first Wikipedia Thomas Nelson Page that popped up was “ Franz Kafka , ” the right answer . This was a crude method . And Fan knew that a computer relying on it would botch the big bulk of Jeopardy clues . It would be crash and burning in the game against even ignorant humans , permit alone Ken Jennings . But one or two time out of ten , it worked . For Fan , it was a start .

The month pass . Fan added more feature film to Basement Baseline . But at the remainder , the system was still escape vital components . Most of import , it had no mechanism for guess its spirit level of confidence in its reply . “ I did n’t have prison term to build one , ” Fan said . This entail the information processing system did n’t be intimate what it knew . In a game , it would n’t have any idea when to buzz . In the end , Fan blew off plot scheme entirely and focused simply on building a machine that could answer Jeopardy clues .

It was on a March morning at IBM labs in Hawthorne , NY , that James Fan ’s Basement Baseline faced off against Big Blue ’s in - house question - answer system , known as Piquant . The results , from Ferrucci ’s perspective , were idealistic . The Piquant organisation succeed on only 30 pct of the clues , far below the level needed for Jeopardy . It had high confidence on

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only 5 percent of them , and of those it got only 47 pct correct . Fan ’s Basement Baseline fare almost as well by a number of measures but was still woefully short of what was necessitate . Fan try that a hacker ’s concoction was far from Jeopardy standards – which was a backup . But by nearly matching the company ’s state - of - the - prowess in Q - A technology , he spotlight its inadequacies .

The Jeopardy challenge , it was clean , would need another curriculum , another applied science weapons platform , and a far bolder approach shot . The caper , Ferrucci say , called for “ the most advanced intelligence activity architecture the world has ever seen . ” He proceeded to tell his bosses that he would lead a squad to assemble a Jeopardy auto — provided that they give him the resource to build a swelled one .

Stephen Baker was BusinessWeek ’s senior engineering author for a decade , free-base first in Paris and later in New York . He has also written for the Los Angeles Times , the Boston Globe , and the Wall Street Journal . Roger Lowenstein called his first leger , THE NUMERATI , “ an eye - opening and scary playscript . ” Baker blogs atfinaljeopardy.net .

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last Jeopardy : Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything is also available fromAmazon.com

take out from FINAL JEOPARDY : Man vs. Machine and the Quest to do it Everything by Stephen Baker . right of first publication © 2011 by Stephen Baker . Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company . All rights appropriate .

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