Introduction

Watson paused. The closest thing it had to a face, a glowing

orb on a flat-panel screen, turned from forest green to

a dark shade of blue. Filaments of yellow and red streamed

steadily across it, like the paths of jets circumnavigating the

globe. This pattern represented a state of quiet anticipation

as the supercomputer awaited the next clue. It was a September

morning in 2010 at IBM Research, in the hills north of

New York City, and the computer, known as Watson, was annihilating

two humans, both champion players, in practice

rounds of Jeopardy! Within months, it would be playing the

game on national television in a million-dollar man vs. machine

match against two of Jeopardy ’s all-time greats.

 As Todd Crain, an actor and the host of these test games,

started to read the next clue, the filaments on Watson’s display

began to jag and tremble. Watson was thinking — or coming

as close to it as a computer could. The $1,600 clue, in the category

The Eyes Have It, read: “This facial ware made Israel’s

Moshe Dayan instantly recognizable worldwide.”

 The three players — two human and one electronic — could

read the words as soon as they appeared on the big Jeopardy

board. But they had to wait for Crain to read the entire clue

before buzzing. That was the rule. As the host pronounced

the last word, a light would signal that contestants could buzz.

The first to hit the button could win $1,600 with the right answer

— or lose the same amount with a wrong one. (In these

test matches, they played with funny money.)

 This pause for reading gave Watson three or four seconds

to hunt down the answer. The first step was to figure out what

the clue meant. One of its programs promptly picked apart

the grammar of the sentence, identifying the verbs, objects,

and key words. In another section, research focused on Moshe

Dayan. Was this a person? A place in Israel? Perhaps a holy

site? Names like John and Maria would signal a person. But

Moshe was more puzzling.

 During these seconds, Watson’s cognitive apparatus —

2,208 computer processors working in concert — mounted a

massive research operation through thousands of documents

around Moshe Dayan and his signature facial ware. After

a second or so, different programs, or algorithms, began to

suggest hundreds of possible answers. To us, many of them

would look like wild guesses. Some were phrases that Dayan

had uttered, others were references to his military campaigns

and facts about Israel. Still others cited various articles of his

clothing. At this point, the computer launched its second

stage of analysis, figuring out which response, if any, merited

its confidence. It proceeded to check and recheck facts, making

sure that Moshe Dayan was indeed a person, an Israeli,

and that the answer referred to something he wore on his face.

 A person looking at Watson’s frantic and repetitive labors

might conclude that the player was unsure of itself, laughably

short on common sense, and scandalously wasteful of com-

puting resources. This was all true. Watson barked up every

tree from every conceivable angle. The pattern on its screen

during this process, circles exploding into little stars, provided

only a hint of the industrial-scale computing at work. In a

room behind the podium, visible through a horizontal window,

Watson’s computers churned, and the fans cooling them

roared. This time, its three seconds of exertion paid off. Watson

came up with a response, sending a signal to a mechanical

device on the podium. It was the size of a large aspirin bottle

with a clear plastic covering. Inside was a Jeopardy buzzer.

About one one-hundredth of a second later, a metal finger inside

this contraption shot downward, pressing the button.

 Justin Bernbach, a thirty-eight-year-old airline lobbyist

from Brooklyn, stood to Watson’s left. He had pocketed

$155,000 while winning seven straight Jeopardy matches in

2009. Unlike Watson, Bernbach understood the sentence. He

knew precisely who Moshe Dayan was as soon as he saw the

clue, and he carried an image of the Israeli leader in his mind.

He gripped the buzzer in his fist and frantically pressed it four

or five times as the light came on.

 But Watson had arrived first.

 “Watson?” said Crain.

 The computer’s amiable male voice arranged the answer,

as Jeopardy demands, in the form of a question: “What is eye

patch?”

 “Very good,” Crain said. “An eye patch on his lefteye.

Choose again, Watson.”

 Bernbach slumped at his podium. This match with the

machine wasn’t going well.

It was going magnificently for David Ferrucci. As the chief scientist

of the team developing the Jeopardy computer, Ferrucci

was feeling vindicated. Only three years earlier, the suggestion

that a computer might match wits and word skills with human

champions in Jeopardy sparked opposition bordering on

ridicule in the halls of IBM Research. And the final goal of

the venture, a nationally televised match against two Jeopardy

legends, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, seemed risky to some,

a bit déclassé to others. Jeopardy, a television show, appeared

to lack the timeless cachet of chess, which IBM computers

had mastered a decade earlier.

 Nonetheless, Ferrucci and his team went ahead and built

their machine. Months earlier, it had fared well in a set of

test matches. But the games revealed flaws in the machine’s

logic and game strategy. It was a good player, but to beat Jennings

and Rutter, who would be jousting for a million-dollar

top prize, it would have to be great. So they had worked

long hours over the summer to revamp Watson. This September

event was the coming-out party for Watson 2.0. It was

the first of fifty-six test matches against a higher level of competitor:

people, like Justin Bernbach, who had won enough

matches to compete in Jeopardy ’s Tournament of Champions.

 In these early matches, Watson was having its way with

them. Ferrucci, monitoring the matches from a crowded observation

booth, was all smiles. Keen to promote its Jeopardy

phenom, IBM’s advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, had

hired a film crew to follow Ferrucci’s team and capture the

drama of this opening round of championship matches. The

observation room was packed with cameras. Microphones on

long booms recorded the back-and-forth of engineers as they

discussed algorithms and Watson’s response time, known as

latency. Ferrucci, wearing a mike on his lapel, gave a blow-byblow

commentary as Watson, on the other side of the glass,

strutted its new and smarter self.

 It was almost as if Watson, like a person giddy with hubris,

was primed for a fall. The computer certainly had its

weaknesses. Even when functioning smoothly, it would make

its share of wacky mistakes. Right before the lunch break,

one clue asked about “the inspiration for this title object in

a novel and a 1957 movie [which] actually spanned the Mae

Khlung.” Now, it would be reasonable for a computer to miss

“The Bridge over the River Kwai,” especially since the actual

river has a different name. Perhaps Watson had trouble understanding

the sentence, which was convoluted at best. But

how did the computer land on its outlandish response, “What

is Kafka?” Ferrucci didnR...