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Partying With Watson

I’m sitting in a room surrounded by people who are smarter than me. We are watching people who are smarter than them.

The event is a viewing party to watch IBM’s Watson computer play “Jeopardy!” against two former “Jeopardy!” champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and I am wracking my brain. But I’m not perplexed about “Jeopardy!” questions on Beatles trivia or famous art thefts. What’s on my mind? I’ll take “For whom I should be rooting?” for $2,000, Alex. Though three contestants are part of the competition, it really breaks down to man vs. machine. I am, obviously, a human being. But I’m also part of “the machine.” Specifically, I am an IBM employee, and this viewing party is taking place in a company cafeteria at an IBM complex in Austin, Texas.

To be clear, though I work for IBM, I had nothing to do with Watson or its creation. I’m an IT architect. My job is to develop systems that deliver computing services to some of the largest companies in the world. But IBM has some 400,000 employees around the world. So the odds of me knowing another IBMer, as we call ourselves, much less working on a particular project with one, are about the same as knowing a particular resident or working in one particular shop in a medium-sized city. So, while I’ve been allowed to join this party, if this were a wedding, I’d be that distant relative that the bride and groom had to invite, not a guest of honor.

But this event is more Super Bowl than wedding celebration, complete with baskets of chips and salsa, sweets and soft drinks. An IBM executive warms up the crowd with an IBM version of “Jeopardy!”, based on IBM trivia like, “This firmware layer protects your assets,” and “Two effects that enable Shift Left for P7.” The correct responses are “What is PHYP?” and “What are VPO and VBU?” Many of the several hundred people around me contributed to the development of the POWER7 technology on which Watson is based. To the people in this room, those were fluff-ball questions of the kind that Larry King might lob at a guest. If anybody had a right to be smug, it would be these folks. And if you needed further validation that this was not a Super Bowl party, you could just count the large number of people pecking away on laptops while the festivities were going on. Yes, we’re a group that knows how to party.

From the show’s start, it’s clear that Watson is the hometown favorite. “Our baby’s doing good, isn’t it?” asks the exec of an exuberant crowd. On a huge screen that hangs from the ceiling in front of the room, we watch as “our baby’s” 2,880 processors handily crunch through its 15 terabytes of memory to find such things as the meaning of the French word “Etude” (“What is study?) and the literary character wanted for general evilness; last seen at the Tower of Barad-Dur (“What is Sauron?”).

The crowd cheers when the first clue Watson chooses somehow turns out to be a prized Jeopardy “Daily Double.” It laughs when Watson, with the over-wrought exactitude of Lieutenant Commander Data, wagers a precise $6,435, on the question. The crowd collectively winces when Watson incorrectly identifies Toronto, instead of Chicago, as the U.S. city with airports named after a World War II war hero and a World War II battle. Then it sighs with relief as it learns that, though Watson got the answer wrong, it had risked a meager $947 of its accumulated $36,681, more than triple the winnings its nearest human competitor.

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