Ken Jennings vs. Computers - Ken Jennings Watson Interview - Esquire

Ken Jennings — the legendary contestant who won seventy-four consecutive games of Jeopardy! in 2004 — is sitting on a bench in Seattle, watching his kids play at the park. He's also running down the reasons why Watson, the IBM artificial-intelligence machine that will one day kill us all, should beat him at the game he once owned.

Funnily enough, they're a lot of the same reasons why Jennings was so good at it. IBM's engineers first began toying with the idea of creating a Jeopardy! supercontestant while they watched Jennings on his run. Like the Watson of their dreams, Jennings seemed purpose-built to win the game.

In a lot of ways, he was.

First, Jennings was extremely fast on his buzzer.

Every Jeopardy! contestant must pass a rigorous series of tests to make it onto the show; there are no dullards behind those podiums, except for that time Wolf Blitzer was on.

"Nearly all the players know nearly all the answers nearly all of the time," Jennings told me this week.

Which is why it's so important to be fast on the buzzer. Contestants can't ring in until banks of lights on either side of the game board — invisible to the viewers at home — flash in their eyes. Host Alex Trebek finishes reading the question — or answer, if you want to be a dork about it — and the lights fire up. Jennings had the timing down to a science, and he only became faster the deeper he went.

Second, Jennings has an incredibly strong associative memory. He studied for his appearances on Jeopardy!, using flash cards and grinding through trivia manuals, but really, his preparation began the day he was born.

The work he did before he appeared on the show gave him what he calls "a purely psychic boost." It was his lifelong curiosity — his genuine interest in our world and its parts and how they work — that made him so hard to beat.

Watson — when it faces Jennings and his fellow record-breaking contestant, Brad Rutter, beginning on February 14 — will take away those twin advantages. It has a limitless memory, a library of facts and information that a human couldn't possibly possess. (It would be like having the Internet inside your head.)

And perhaps more alarmingly for the humans standing on either side of it, Watson will be hard-wired into the game board. When those banks of lights come to life, Watson will be triggered by an electrical impulse. Jennings's and Rutter's nervous systems will be racing against a higher voltage, and it's been a long time since anyone could turn off the lights and get into bed before the room got dark.

A former software engineer, Jennings remembers thinking, when he was first told of the idea behind Watson a couple of years ago, that a computer capable of playing Jeopardy! was decades away. "I was very skeptical," he says.

But then he watched Watson play its pre-game sparring matches, and he felt a growing nervousness in his stomach. "It's really amazing," Jennings says. "Watson gives you only the tiniest window. It never forgets. And its buzzer reflexes will make me look like... What's an example of someone with really bad reflexes?"

Jennings watches his kids play for a moment.

"Like an eighty-year-old ex-hippie, I guess."

And there's that tiny window, cracking open.

Watson's weakness, as small as it might be, will be its cognitive thinking, its interpretive and linguistic skills. Jeopardy! isn't chess. It isn't a binary game; it's not call-and-response. Each clue is its own little geometry puzzle, a riddle buried underneath puns and wordplay. It does require quick reflexes and an enormous memory bank, but the beauty of Jeopardy! always has been that it requires something more than that. It requires an understanding of art.

"Watson might be able to answer a clue, but it could never write a new one," Jennings says. "It can figure out how to tell a joke, but it will never laugh at it."

Jennings, sitting on that park bench in Seattle, sounds as though he's building himself up — as though he's convincing himself that he or Rutter can win on behalf of humanity. (In truth, the games have already been played; Sony's snipers on the nearby rooftops keep Jennings from saying who won or by how much.) But in that moment of apparent self-motivation, Jennings revealed the biggest reason he went on his tear in 2004: He wanted badly to win, and he believed that he could.

"I expected it," he says. "When you see people who are really good at game shows, the one common attribute is a cool head under pressure: an ability to perform as well in the studio, surrounded by lights and noise, as you do on your couch. Obviously, that's trivial for a computer. It has no emotions, no stage fright. It plays its best possible game at any given moment."

But that means computers don't have our desire, either. Nerves are our body's internal signal that we care about the outcome of an event. We choke when our heart's wishes override our more mechanical systems. For a computer, there are no butterflies, but that also means that it doesn't care. There's no psychic boost it can be given or give itself.

Ken Jennings won seventy-four straight games partly because he was built to, but mostly because he wanted to.

Watson doesn't have anything like that kind of will.

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via esquire.com