Jeopardy’s Man vs. Machine Features Two Great Humans

Monday, 14 February 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Tonight’s the night the IBM computer Watson faces two Jeopardy veterans, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. I worked with both men on GSN’s Grand Slam a few years ago and can assure you that Watson’s got a tough assignment.

In the fast-paced format of Grand Slam, Jennings was the stronger of the two. Grand Slam required a combination of puzzle-solving skill, math and trivia knowledge and Jennings combined that with an ability to follow the rhythms of the game. Nowhere was that clearer than in this segment—which I’ve described as the most intense two minutes on any game show I’ve done:

Rutter didn’t warm up to Grand Slam’s format as quickly as Jennings. But he’s a proven force on Jeopardy, where he beat Jennings in the show’s Tournament of Champions. In this Grand Slam clip, he’s up against Amy Kelly, who qualified for the game after a successful appearance on the word game Lingo.

There’s been a huge amount of pre-Watson publicity, including an excellent Nova documentary on PBS last week. Author Stephen Baker’s book “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything” details the IBM project and what it helps us to understand about artificial intelligence. And Jennings writes a brief post for his always-entertaining blog, noting he and Rutter had to carry more than their fair share of the pre-game interviews thanks to a lack of help from the lifeless Watson.

And Game show historian Steve Beverly has an interesting perspective on his blog. He calls the Watson challenge a gimmick, but of the two human competitors he writes: “I’m looking forward to this simply to see two great players get together to tee it up again.”

I agree with Steve that the human competitors are an interesting matchup on their own. But after watching the PBS documentary and seeing Watson’s training sessions, I’m eager to see how the computer performs. In the trials, Watson was great at retrieving simple facts, but was often confused by clever or tricky phrasing in a question.

There’s been plenty of Jeopardy analysis ahead of tonight’s IBM challenge. One of the best pieces I saw was Slate’s analysis of thousands of Jeopardy questions. Writer Jeremy Singer-Vine used a computer to analyze the questions contained in the wonderful J-Archive, and found “Classical Music” is the toughest category on the show. Contestants have answered those questions right just 72 percent of the time.

In an Esquire preview, writer Chris Jones explains the strengths and weaknesses of Watson.

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything