Free Final Jeopardy by Stephen Baker Page B

laughable. On the positive side, it wouldn’t suffer from nerves. On certain clues it would surely piece together its statistical analysis and summon the most obscure answers with sufficient speed to match that of Ken Jennings. But could they ensure enough of these successes to win?

    Ken Jennings’s remarkable streak came to an end in a game televised in November 2004. Following a rare lackluster performance, he was only $4,400 ahead of Nancy Zerg, a real estate agent from Ventura, California. It came down to the Final Jeopardy clue: “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.”
    The
Jeopardy
jingle came on, and Jennings put his brain into drive. But the answer, he said, just wasn’t there. He didn’t read the business pages of newspapers. Companies were one of his few weak spots. He guessed, “What is FedEx?” When Zerg responded correctly, “What is H&R Block?” Jennings knew his reign was over. During his streak, he had amassed more than $2.5 million in earnings and became perhaps the first national brand for general braininess since the disgraced Charles Van Doren.
    Harry Friedman, of course, was far too smart a producer to let such an asset walk away. A year later, he featured Jennings in a wildly promoted Ultimate Tour of Champions. This eventually brought Jennings into a threesome featuring the two leading money winners from before 2003, when winners were limited to five matches. Both Jerome Vered and Brad Rutter had retired as undefeated champions under the rules at the time. Rutter, who had dropped out of Johns Hopkins University and worked for a time at a music store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had never lost a
Jeopardy
match.
    In the 2005 showdown, Rutter handled both Jennings and Vered with relative ease. He was so fast to the buzzer, Jennings later said, that sometimes the light to open the buzzing didn’t appear to turn on. “It was off before it was on,” he said. “I don’t know if the filaments got warmed up.” In the three days of competition, Rutter piled up 62,000, compared to 34,599 for Jennings and 20,600 for Vered. (These weren’t dollars but points, since they were playing for a far larger purse.) Rutter won another $2 million, catapulting him past Jennings as the biggest money winner in
Jeopardy
history.
    These two, Rutter and Jennings, were the natural competitors for an IBM machine. To establish itself as the
Jeopardy
king, the computer had to vanquish the best. These two players fit the bill. And they promised to be formidable opponents. They had human qualities a
Jeopardy
computer could never approach: fluency in language, an intuitive feel for hints and suggestion, and a mastery of ideas and concepts. Beyond that, they appeared to boast computer-like qualities: vast memories, fast processors, and nerves of steel. No tip-of-the-tongue glitches for Jennings or Rutter. But would a much-ballyhooed match against a machine awaken their human failings? Ferrucci and his team could always hope.

3. Blue J Is Born
    IN THOSE EARLY DAYS of 2007, when Blue J was no more than a conditional promise given to Paul Horn, David Ferrucci harbored two conflicting fears. By nature he was given to worrying, and the first of his nightmare scenarios was perfectly natural: A
Jeopardy
computer would fail, embarrassing the company and his team.
    But his second concern, failure’s diabolical twin, was perhaps even more terrifying. What if IBM spent tens of millions of dollars and devoted centuries of researcher years to this project, played it up in the press, and then, perhaps on the eve of the nationally televised
Jeopardy
showdown, someone beat them to it? Ferrucci pictured a solitary hacker in a garage, cobbling together free software from the Web and maybe hitching it to Wikipedia and other online sites. What if the
Jeopardy
challenge turned out to be not too hard but too easy?
    That would be