Could Watson Have Been Defeated By Homebrew?
Well before Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM’s design team grappled with a different challenge – getting beaten to the punch by someone else inventing a trivia-savvy artificial mind. Final Jeopardy discusses Watson’s early development and how this Q&A juggernaut overcame the “Basement Baseline.”
In the early days of 2007, before he agreed to head up a Jeopardy project, IBM’s David Ferrucci harboured two conflicting fears. 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 saw 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 databases. What if the Jeopardy challenge turned out to be not too hard but too easy?
