Final Jeopardy Read Online Free PDF Page B

yet to see. She wagered $500, a third of her winnings, and was faced with this clue: “This store fixture began in 15th century Europe as a table whose top was marked for measuring.” She missed it, guessing, “What is a cutting table?,” and lost $500. (“What is a counter?” was the correct response.) It was early in the game and didn’t have much impact. The three players were all around the $1,000 mark. But later in a game, Ferrucci saw, Daily Doubles gave contestants the means to storm back from far behind. A computer playing the game would require a clever game program to calibrate its bets.
    The biggest of the wild cards was Final Jeopardy, the last clue of the game. As in Daily Doubles, contestants could bet all or part of their winnings on a single category. But all three contestants participated—as long as they had positive earnings. Often the game boiled down to betting strategies in Final Jeopardy. Take that 1994 contest, in which the betting took a strange turn. Going into Final Jeopardy, Rachael Schwartz led Kurt Bray, a scientist from Oceanside, California, by a slim margin, $9,200 to $8,600. The category was Historic Names. To lock down a win, she had to assume he would bet everything, reaching $17,200. A bet of $8,001 would give her one dollar more, provided she got it right. But if they both bet big and missed, they might fall to the third-place contestant, Brian Moore, a Ph.D. candidate from Pearland, Texas. In the minute or so that they took to place their bets, the two leaders had to map out the probabilities of a handful of different scenarios. They wrote down their dollar numbers and waited for the clue: “Though he spent most of his life in Europe, he was governor of the Bahamas for most of World War II.”
    The second-place player, Bray, was the only one to get it right: “Who was Edward VIII?” Yet he had bet only $500. It was a strange number. It placed him $100 behind the leader, not ahead of her. But the bet kept him beyond the reach of the third-place player. Most players bet at least something on a clue. If Schwartz had wagered and missed, he would win. Indeed, Schwartz missed the clue. She didn’t even bother guessing. But she had bet nothing, leaving herself $100 ahead and winning the game.
    The betting in Final Jeopardy, Ferrucci saw, might actually play to the strength of a computer. A machine could analyze betting patterns over thousands of games. It could crunch the probabilities and devise optimized strategies in a fraction of a second. “Computers are good at that kind of math,” he said.
    It was the rest of
Jeopardy
that appeared daunting. The game featured complex questions and a wide use of puns posing trouble for literal-minded computers. Then there was
Jeopardy
’s nearly boundless domain. Smaller and more specific subject areas were easier for computers, because they offered a more manageable set of facts and relationships to master. They provided context. A word like “leak,” for example, had a specific meaning in deep-sea drilling, another in heart surgery, and a third in corporate press relations. A know-it-all computer would have to recognize different contexts to keep the meanings clear. And
Jeopardy
’s clues took the concept of a broad domain to a near-ludicrous extreme. The game had an entire category on Famous Understudies. Another was on the oft-forgotten president Rutherford B. Hayes. Worse, from a computer architect’s point of view, the game demanded answers within seconds—and penalized players for getting them wrong. A
Jeopardy
machine, just like the humans on the show, would have to store all of its knowledge in its internal memory. (The challenge, IBM figured, wouldn’t be nearly as impressive if a bionic player had access to unlimited information on the Web. What’s more,
Jeopardy
would be unlikely to accept a Web-surfing contestant, since others didn’t have the same