Last year at this time I was posting a blog concerning my latest attempt at the Jeopardy online test, which you must "pass" in order to get to the next stage, "a formal interview" if you ever hope to be a contestant on the show. From what I've experienced, it has become clear that the screening process and subsequent mock shows are harder to get through than MIT doctoral oral comps.
And if that's not enough, if you somehow get through that gauntlet of hyper-information and scrutiny, you may just luck out and finish...third...out of three. That ignominy will pay you the princely sum of $1000! No, I did not leave off a zero. No, I did not mistakenly put in a "1" instead of something else. So not only did you get to fail on national television under the watchful eyes of millions of viewers; you got to fail miserably.
$1000 dollars would not pay the airfare for the not one, but two trips to California I'd have to make if I did indeed get on. One trip for the test show, the other for the real show.
It's not like just appearing on the show is going to get you all kinds of notoriety that you can parley into something much more grandiose. You don't go on with the hope that your appearance will somehow be a career boost. If you finish last -let's call it what it is- the next day no one in America outside of your immediate family and close circle of friends will recognize your name. No stranger is going to walk up to you on the street and say, "Hey, aren't you Joe Biffleschpick? I saw you on Jeopardy last night." They may say, "Man, I know your face from somewhere, I just can't place it. Give me a minute, (several may pass before you uncomfortably make a move to continue on your merry way). Oh, I know! You're the guy who lost on Jeopardy last night. And for that you are thankful. Because he could have said "Hey, I saw you on America's Most Wanted last night! Don't move, I'm calling the cops!"
If you do happen to step in a huge pile of poo and pull enough "trivia," -as Yahoo News refers to that kind of knowledge- out of your ass; and you're able to squeeze a hand-held buzzer faster enough times than two other humans, you could possibly win. Now that you've overcome these seemingly insurmountable odds, for your trouble you may win a lot of money; rarely less than $10,000, less rarely more than $30,000. Two men who won night after agonizing night and walked away with over two million and three million respectively came back to Jeopardy for a showdown that aired Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.Their showdown had one other contestant; a machine.
For several weeks Jeopardy promoted the appearance of its two most celebrated contestants matching their "knowledge" versus that of an IBM supercomputer. Sounds intriguing right? And then I thought about it. HAL from "2001" on steroids against two "trivia" kings. My mind reasoned "no contest."
"Watson," as the supercomputer is named, had so much information downloaded into its memory that it would take a man 256,000 years to acquire such knowledge. To add insult to injury, the machine's reaction time would far exceed that of a human. I decided I wasn't going to watch, but I did listen in periodically.
As I anticipated the buzzing in for the humans was a real challenge. Challenge my ass, it was a near impossibility. The only way for one of the humans to buzz in first, was if the computer (I refuse to call it "Watson."), did not have a ready answer within the 90th percentile of the possibility of being correct. You could see the frustration on the real contestants faces.
Speaking of faces, the faces in the audience were not the usual studio variety. The cameras seemed to fix on the glowing IBM think tank that put together this modern marvel of technological science; ahem. Excuse me if I don't share the enthusiasm of mankind's capabilities in the field. It was creepy to hear the audience applaud when the computer got a Daily Double. It was creepier still to hear Alex Trebek congratulate the computer when answering what he deemed to be a particularly difficult question. And then using a personal pronoun when addressing the computer completely weirded me out; referring to the computer as "you" rather than "it." All this for the sake of stimulating entertainment...and giving IBM a chance to showcase how brilliant they are. I wonder if the companies stock went up?
I rationalized that the two humans must be getting paid a boat load of money just to appear, knowing that they'd be humiliated on national TV. No, I was told, there would be a prize pool with the "winner" getting a million dollars...and a ton of exposure for IBM, because you had to know who the winner going in was going to be right Alex?
When Big Blue, another IBM supercomputer played Gary Kasparov, and whoever is currently the world chess champ, both parties know all the possible moves and counter-moves. If the human doesn't have a brain fart, the match could conceivably end in a draw. Not so with an infinite number of questions to choose from.
To put a big bow around this whole three half-hour advertisement for IBM, all of the money won by the computer would be donated to charity, half of what the humans won would be as well. I read on Yahoo the marvelous benefit a computer like this would be to the medical field, and I ought right medical; more like defense would get first dibs.
Thank goodness this little expo only ran three days, five days would have been too painful for the human contestants no matter how much sacrificial lamb money they were getting. I sure hope that the IBM team of who knows how many are proud that they could come up with a talking computer that can store and recall more information than a human. When the computer "spoke" the voice sounded eerily similar to another computer. The one that asked Matthew Broderick "Would you like to play a game?" That's all our defense department needs.
Epilogue: When searching for a picture to accompany this weeks blog, I used the search term "scary computers." An image of the two human contestants, Alex Trebek, and the IBM supercomputer was in the tenth row as I scrolled down.
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