Final Jeopardy chronicles IBM's efforts to build a computer system that was able of competing with humans at Jeopardy. I was first introduced to Jeopardy as a young child as my parents, older brother, and grandparents were avid watchers. An early memory of mine is being allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch Jeopardy. The main things I learned were that I didn't particularly like Alex Trebek, my parents had crazy amount of knowledge, and so did my older brother, which belied his age. It's no surprise to me that a team of my mom and older brother throttled his college roommates during a game of Trivial Pursuit. Back to the book. Baker tells a fantastic story, delving into the main players, on IBM's side, on Jeopardy's side, and the human contestants, mainly Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. We get to see the entire process of the development of the computer, Watson, the first inklings of the idea, the formulation of a build strategy, the how tos of teaching cognition and linguistics to a computer and endless troubleshooting. On the surface it doesn't seem so difficult to program a computer to answer factual questions, but when you start to see the types of tricks, idiosyncrasies and reliance on human linguistics that are present in Jeopardy questions, you begin to see the gargantuan size of the task in front of the IBM team. As someone who mildly followed the news surrounding Watson's development and watched with interest the two-day televised affair, the in-depth look was fascinating in many ways. IBM took a curious business strategy to Watson, or lack thereof rather, They built him before figuring out how he would be used or marketed. We now see that the uses are endless. Seemingly small details such as his name, display, "finger", and IBM branding all speak to the complexity inherent in any business undertaking. A dedication to the details in the planning and foundational stages of any project add much to the probability of success. Watson succeeded in defeating Jennings and Rutter, while still displaying cognitive lapses. IBM succeeded in a big way with Watson, and while the artificial intelligence has certainly not been reached, it has been furthered by a large leap.
