ON A LATE SUMMER day in 2004, a twenty-nine-year-old software engineer named Ken Jennings placed a mammoth $12,000 bet on a Daily Double in Jeopardy. The category was Literary Pairs. Jennings, who by that point had won a record fifty straight games, was initially flummoxed by the clue: “The film title ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ comes from a poem about these ill-fated medieval lovers.” As the seconds passed, Jennings flipped through every literary medieval couple he could conjure up—Romeo and Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura—but he found reasons to disqualify each one. Time was running out. A difference of $24,000 was at stake, enough for a new car. Jennings quickly reviewed the clue. On his second reading, something about the wording suggested to him that the medieval lovers were historical figures, not literary characters or their creators. He said he couldn’t put his finger on it, but it had “a flavor of history.” At that point, the names of the French philosopher Peter Abelard and his student and lover, Heloise, popped into Jennings’s mind. It was the answer. He just knew it. It was their correspondence, the hundreds of letters they exchanged after their tragic separation, that qualified them as a literary pair. He pronounced the names as time ran out, pocketed the $12,000, and moved on to the next clue.
In answering that single clue, Jennings displayed several peerless qualities of the human mind, ones that IBM’s computer engineers would be hard-pressed to instill in a machine. First, he immediately understood the complex clue. Unlike even the most sophisticated computers, he was a master of human language. Far beyond basic comprehension, he picked up nuance in the wording so very subtle that even he failed to decode it. Yet it pushed him toward the answer. Once Abelard and Heloise surfaced, more human magic kicked in: He knew he was right. While a Jeopardy computer would no doubt weigh thousands, even millions, of possibilities, humans could look at a mere handful and often pick the right one with utter confidence. Humans just know things. And good Jeopardy players often sense that they’ll find the answer, even before it comes to mind. “It’s an odd feeling,” Jennings wrote in his 2005 memoir, Brainiac. “The answer’s not on the tip of your tongue yet, but a light flashes in the recesses of your brain. A connection has been made, and you find your thumb pressing the buzzer while the brain races to catch up.”
Perhaps the greatest advantage humans would enjoy over a Jeopardy machine was kinship with the fellow humans who had written the clues. With each clue, participants attempt to read the mind of the writers. What response could they be looking for? In an easy $200 category, would the writers expect players to recognize a Caribbean nation as small as Santa Lucia? With that offhand reference to “candid,” could they be pointing toward Voltaire’s Candide? Would they ever stack the European Capitals category with two clues featuring Dublin? When playing Jeopardy, Jennings said, “You’re not just parsing the question, you’re getting into the head of the writer.” In this psychological aspect of the game, a computer would be out of its league.
Computers, of course, can rummage through mountains of data millions of times faster than humans. But humans compensate with mental shortcuts, many of them honed over millions of years of evolution. Instead of plowing through copious evidence, humans instinctively read signals and draw quick conclusions, whether they involve trusting a stranger or deciding where to pitch a tent. “Mortals cannot know the world, but must rely on uncertain inferences, on bets rather than demonstrable proof,” wrote the German psychologist Gert Gigerenzer. In recent decades, psychologists have unearthed dozens of these rules, known as heuristics. Many of them would guide humans in a Jeopardy match against a much faster computer.
The most elementary heuristic is based on favoring the first answer to pop into the brain. That one automatically starts in the front of the line; it is more trusted simply by virtue of arriving early. Which ideas pop in first? Following another heuristic, they’re often the answers contestants are most familiar with. Given a choice between a well-known place or person or an obscure one, studies show that people opt for what they know. “If you ask people, ‘Which of these two cities has a larger population,’ they’ll almost always choose the more familiar one,” said Richard Carlson, a professor of cognitive psychology at Penn State. Usually this works. If a Jeopardy player has to name the most populous cities in a certain country, the most famous ones—London, Tokyo, Berlin, New York—often fit the bill. This approach can lead to bloopers, of course. But it happens less often in Jeopardy than in the outside world. Why? Again, the writers, being human, work from the same rules of thumb, and they’re eager to connect with contestants and with the nine million people watching on TV. They want the contestants to succeed and to look smart, and they want people at home to feel smart, too. That’s critical to Jeopardy’s popularity. “You can’t forget that it’s a TV show,” said Roger Craig, a six-time Jeopardy champion. “They’re writing for the person in the living room.” And that viewer, like Ken Jennings—and unlike a computer—races along well-worn mental paths to answer questions. These paths are marked with signs and signals that call out to the human brain and help it navigate.
A century ago, the psychologist William James divided human thought into two types, associative and true reasoning. For James, associative thinking worked from historical patterns and rules in the mind. True reasoning, which was necessary for unprecedented problems, demanded deeper analysis. This came to be known as the “dual process” theory. Late in the twentieth century, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton redefined these cognitive processes as System 1 and System 2. The intuitive System 1 appeared to represent a primitive part of the mind, perhaps dating from before the cognitive leap undertaken by our tool-making Cro-Magnon ancestors forty thousand years ago. Its embedded rules, with their biases toward the familiar, steered people toward their most basic goals: survival and reproduction. System 2, which appeared to arrive later, involved conscious and deliberate analysis and was far slower. When it came to intelligence, all humans were more or less on an equal footing in the ancient and intuitive System 1. The rules were easy, and whether they made sense or not, everyone knew them. It was in the slower realm of reasoning, System 2, that intelligent people distinguished themselves from the crowd.
Still, great Jeopardy players like Ken Jennings cannot afford to ignore the signals coming from the caveman quarters of their minds. They need speed, and the easy answers pouring in through System I are often correct. But they have to know when to distrust this reflexive thought, when to pursue a longer and more analytical route. In the same game in which Jennings tracked down Abelard and Heloise, this clue popped up in the Tricky Questions category: “Total number of each animal that Moses took on the ark with him during the great flood.” Jennings lost the buzz to Matt Kleinmaier, a medical student from Chicago, who answered, “What is two?” It was wrong. Jennings, aware that it was supposed to be tricky, noticed that it asked for “each animal” instead of “each species.” He buzzed for a second chance at the clue and answered, “What is one?” That was wrong, too. The correct answer, which no one came up with, was “What is zero?”
Jennings and Kleinmaier had fallen for a trick. Each had focused on the gist of the clue—the number of animals boarding the biblical ark—while ignoring one detail: The ark builder was Noah, not Moses. This clue actually came from a decades-old psychological experiment, one that has given a name—the Moses Illusion—to the careless thinking that most humans employ.
It’s easy enough to understand. The brain groups information into clusters. (Unlike computers, it doesn’t move packets of encoded data this way and that. The data stay put and link up through neural connections.) People tend to notice when one piece of information doesn’t jibe with its expected group. It’s an anomaly. But Noah and Moses cohabit numerous clusters. Thematically they are both in the Bible, visually, both wear beards. Phonetically, their names almost rhyme. A question about Ezekiel herding animals into the ark might not pass so smoothly. According to a study headed by Lynn Reder, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, the Moses Illusion illustrates a facet of human intelligence, one vital for Jeopardy.
Most of what humans experience as perception is actually furnished by the memory. This is because the conscious brain can only process a trickle of data. Psychologists agree that only one to four “items,” either thoughts or sensations, can be held in mind, immediately available to consciousness, at the same time. Some have tried to quantify these constraints. According to the work of Manfred Zimmerman of Germany’s Heidelberg University, only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second. Many psychologists object to these attempts to measure thoughts and perceptions as digital bits. But however they’re measured, the stark limits of the mind are clear. It’s as if each person’s senses generated enough data to run a 3D Omnimax movie with Dolby sound—only to funnel it through an antediluvian modem, one better suited to Morse code. So how do humans re-create the Omnimax experience? They focus on the items that appear most relevant and round them out with stored memories, what psychologists call “schemas.”
In the Moses example, people concentrate on the question about animals. The biblical details, which appear to fit into their expected clusters, are ignored. It’s only when a wrong name intrudes from outside the expected orbit that alarms go off. In one experiment at Carnegie Mellon, when researchers substituted a former U.S. president for Moses, people noticed right away. Nixon had nothing to do with the ark, they said.
Even after falling victim to the Moses Illusion, Jennings found no fault in his own thinking. “The brain’s doing the right thing!” he said. “It’s focusing on the right part of the question: How many animals did the biblical figure take onto the ark?” That, he said, is how the brain should work. “It’s just that the question writer has found a way to work against you.” Those sorts of tricks, he added, are uncommon on Jeopardy.
Strangely enough, the cerebral carelessness that leads to the Moses Illusion also serves a useful function for human thought. Filtering out details not only eliminates time-consuming busy work. It also allows people to overlook many variations and to generalize. This is important. If they focus too much on small changes, they might think, for example, that each time a friend gets a haircut or a suntan, she’s a different person. Instead, the brain settles on the gist of the person and is ready to look past some details—or, in many cases, to ignore them. This can be embarrassing. (Sometimes it is a different person.) Still, by skipping over details, the brain is carrying out a process that is central to human intelligence and one that confounds computers. It’s thinking more broadly and focusing on concepts.
The Jeopardy studio sits on the sun-drenched Sony lot in Culver City. Seven miles south of Hollywood’s Sunset and Vine, this was a suburban hinterland when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) started making movies there in 1915. In later decades it turned out such classics as The Wizard of Oz and Ben Hur—all of them introduced by the iconic roaring lion. Following years of mergers and acquisitions, the lot became the property of a Japanese industrial giant—a development that likely would have shocked Samuel Goldwyn. Sony later gobbled up Columbia Studios, which had belonged to Coca-Cola for a few years in the eighties. On the Sony lot, the MGM lion gave way to Lady Liberty holding her torch. In the summer of 2007, as IBM considered a Jeopardy project, tourists on the Sony lot were filing past the sets of Spiderman II and Will Smith’s Happyness. Others with free passes lined up for Jeopardy. If they made their way past the fake Main Street, with its cinema, souvenir shop, and café, they would come across a low-slung office building named for Robert Young, the actor who played the homespun 1970s doctor Marcus Welby, M.D.
This is where Harry Friedman worked. Friedman, then in his late fifties, was the executive producer of both Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, the top- and second-ranked game shows in America. Wheel, as it was known, relied on the chance of a spinning wheel and required only the most rudimentary knowledge of common phrases and titles. Its host was a former TV weatherman named Pat Sajak, who had been accompanied since 1983 by the lovely Vanna White. She had showcased more than four thousand dresses through the years while turning the letters on the big board and leading the clapping while the roulette wheel spun. For some Jeopardy fans, even mentioning the two games in the same breath was an outrage. It would be like card players comparing the endlessly complex game of Bridge to Go Fish. Nevertheless, Wheel attracted some eleven million viewers every weeknight evening, and about nine million tuned in to Jeopardy. Harry Friedman’s job, while touching on the world of knowledge and facts, was to keep those millions of people watching his two hit shows. In a media world exploding with new choices, it was a challenge.
In movie studios on this Sony-Columbia lot, men with the bookish mien of Harry Friedman are cast as professors, dentists, and accountants. His hair, which recedes toward the back of his head, is still dark, and matches the rims of his glasses. His love for television dates back to his childhood. His father ran one of the first TV dealerships in Omaha, and the family had the first set in the neighborhood, a 1950 Emerson with a rounded thirteen-inch screen. Friedman’s goal as a youngster was to write for TV. While he was in college, he pursued writing, working part-time as a sports and general assignment reporter for the Lincoln Star. After graduating, in 1971, he traveled to Hollywood. He eventually landed a part-time job at Hollywood Squares, a popular daytime game show, where he wrote for $5 a joke.
Friedman climbed the ladder at Hollywood Squares, eventually producing the show. He also wrote stand-up acts for comedians and entertainers, people like Marty Allen and Johnny Carson’s old trumpet-playing bandleader, Doc Severinsen. He got his big break in 1994, when he was offered the top job at Wheel of Fortune. The show, a sensation in the 1980s, was stagnating. Friedman soon saw that antiquated technology had slowed the game to a crawl. The spectators, hosts, and audience had to sit and wait for ten or fifteen minutes between each round while workers installed the next phrase or jingle with big cardboard letters. Friedman ordered a shift to electronic letters. The game speeded up. Ratings improved.
Two years later, he was offered the top job at Jeopardy. The game, which today radiates such wholesomeness, emerged from the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. “That’s where we came from. That’s our history,” Friedman said. Back then, millions tuned their new TV sets to programs that featured intellectual brilliance. Among the most popular was Twenty-One, where a brainy young college professor named Charles Van Doren appeared to be all but omniscient. The ratings soared as Van Doren summoned answers. Often they came instantly. Other times he appeared to dig into the dusky caverns of his memory, surfacing with the answer only after a torturous and suspenseful mental hunt. Van Doren seemed to epitomize brilliance. He was a phenomenon, a national star. This was the kind of brainpower the United States would be needing—in technology, diplomacy, and education—to prevail over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Knowledge was sexy. And when it turned out that the producers were feeding Van Doren the answers, a national scandal erupted. It led to congressional hearings, a condemnation by President Eisenhower—“a terrible thing to do to the American people”—and stricter regulations covering the industry. For a few years, quiz shows all but disappeared.
In 1963, Merv Griffin, the talk show host and entrepreneur, was wondering how to resurrect the format. According to a corporate history book, he was in an airplane with his wife, Julann, when the two of them came up with an idea. If people suspect that you’re feeding contestants the answers, why not devise a show that provides the answers—and forces players to come up with the questions?
It was the birth of Jeopardy. Griffin came up with simple, enduring rules, the sixty clues, including three hidden Daily Doubles and the tiny written exam for Final Jeopardy. To fill the thirty seconds while the players scribbled their final response on a card, Griffin wrote a catchy sixty-four-note jingle that became synonymous with the show. He hired Art Fleming, a strait-laced actor in TV commercials, as the game’s host. In March 1964, Jeopardy was launched as a daytime show. It continued through 1975 and reappeared briefly at the end of that decade.
Griffin brought Jeopardy back in 1984 as a syndicated evening show hosted by a young, mustachioed Alex Trebek. A new board game, Trivial Pursuit, was a national rage, and the mood seemed right for a Jeopardy revival. The new game was much the same—the three-contestant format, the (painfully) contrived little chats with the host following the first commercial break, and the jingle during Final Jeopardy. It took time for the new show to catch on. In its first year, it was relegated to the wee hours in many markets, including New York. But within a few years, it settled into early evening time slots. It was eventually syndicated on 210 stations and became a ritual for millions of fact-loving viewers.
Still, when Friedman arrived at Jeopardy in 1997, he saw a problem. Too many of the questions still focused on academic subjects. They were the same types of history, geography, and literature clues that had captivated America four decades earlier, when Charles Van Doren paraded his faux smarts. But times had changed, and so had America’s intellectual appetite. Sure, some of the most dedicated viewers still subscribed to the show’s mission, to inform and educate. They wanted reminders on the river that separated cisalpine Gaul from Italy in Roman times (“What is the Rubicon?”), the last British colony on the American mainland to gain independence (“What is Belize?”), and the 1851 novel that contained “a dissertation on cetology” (“What is Moby Dick?”).
These were the Jeopardy purists. They tended to be older, raised in Van Doren’s heyday. But their ranks were shrinking as other types of information were exploding on the brand-new World Wide Web. As Friedman put it: “Anything that veered off the academic foundation was deemed to be pop culture. And to purists, that was heresy.” But he feared that Jeopardy would lose relevance if it relied on academic clues in an age of much broader information.
So he leavened the mix, bringing in more of the topics that consumed people on coffee breaks, from sports to soap opera. If you remembered the person who conspired in 1994 to “whack Nancy Kerrigan’s knee” (“Who is Tonya Harding?”), you probably didn’t learn about her while reading Bartlett’s Quotations or brushing up on the battle of Gettysburg. Sometimes Friedman blended the popular and the scholarly. During the 1999 season, one category was called Readings from Homer. It featured clues about the other Homer, author of the Odyssey and the Iliad, read by Dan Castelleta, the voice of the lovable dunce of TV’s The Simpsons. The clues were written in the dumbed-down style of the modern Homer: “Hero speaking here: ‘Nine days I drifted on the teeming sea . . . upon the tenth we came to the coastline of the lotus eaters. . . . Mmmm, lotus!’” (“Who is Odysseus?”)
From the perspective of a Jeopardy computer, it’s worth noting that Friedman’s adjustments to the Jeopardy canon made the game harder. Instead of mastering a set of formal knowledge, the computer would have to troll the ever-expanding universe of what modern folk carried around in their heads. This shifted the focus from what people should know to what they did know—collectively speaking—from a few shelves of reference books to the entire Internet. What’s more, for a computer, the formal stuff—the factoids—tended to be far easier. Facts often appear in lists, many of them accompanied by dates. One mention of the year 1215, and any self-respecting Jeopardy computer could sniff out the relevant document (“What is the Magna Carta?”). But imagine a computer responding to this clue: “Here are the rules: if the soda container stops rotating & faces you, it’s time to pucker up” (“What is Spin the Bottle?”).
Yes, Harry Friedman turned Jeopardy into a tougher game for computers, and he also built it into a breeding ground for celebrity champions. Throughout its history, Jeopardy maintained a strict limit of five matches for returning champs. This seemed unfair to Friedman, and he debated it with colleagues for years. The downside? “You get somebody on the show who is there forever,” he said. Imagine if the person was unlikable or, worse, boring. Nonetheless, he lifted the limit in 2003. And the following year—wouldn’t you know it?—a contestant stayed around for months and months. It seemed like forever. But this, it turned out, wasn’t a bad thing at all. Ratings soared. Jeopardy had hatched its first celebrity.
His name was Ken Jennings. Nothing about the man suggested quiz show dominance. Unlike basketball, where a phenom like LeBron James emerged in high school, amid monster dunks, as the Next Big Thing, a Jeopardy champion like Jennings could surprise even himself. A computer programmer from Salt Lake City, Jennings had competed in quiz bowl events during high school and college. A turn on Jeopardy would be a kick. So in the summer of 2003, he and a friend drove from Salt Lake City to the Jeopardy studios in Culver City and took the qualifying exam. Jennings was pleased to pass it. And he was surprised, nine months later, to get the call that he’d been selected to play. He promptly started cramming his head with facts and dates about movies, kings, and presidents.
His first game came a month later. Before the game, Jennings, like every other contestant, had to tape a short promotion, a “Hometown Howdy,” to be played in Salt Lake City the day before the show aired. It is typically corny, and his was no exception: “Hey there, Utah. This is Ken Jennings from Salt Lake City, and I hope the whole Beehive State will be buzzing about my appearance on Jeopardy.” Little did he know that within months, not just the Beehive State, but the whole country, would be buzzing about Ken Jennings.
In his first game, he wrote in Brainiac, it was only through the leniency of a judge’s ruling that he managed to win. After two rounds, he held a slim $20,000 to $18,800 lead over the next player, Julia Lazerus, a fundraiser from New York City. The reigning champ, a Californian named Jerry Harvey, trailed far behind, with only $7,400. The category for Final Jeopardy was The 2000 Olympics. Though Jennings had been on his honeymoon during the two weeks of the Sydney Olympics and hadn’t seen a single event, he bet $17,201. This would ensure victory if Lazerus bet everything and they both got it right. If she wagered more modestly—betting that he’d miss—and won, a wrong answer would cost Jennings the game.
Trebek read the Final Jeopardy clue: “She’s the first female track-and-field athlete to win five medals in five different events in a single Olympics.” Jennings wrote that he was racked by doubt. He knew that Marion Jones was the big medal winner in that Olympics. (In 2007, Jones would admit to doping and surrender her medals.) To Jennings, Jones seemed too obvious. Everyone knew her. There had to be some kind of trick. But he couldn’t come up with another answer. In the end, following common Jeopardy protocol, he skipped her first name and wrote: “Who is Jones?” A botched first name or middle initial, players knew, turned a correct response into a wrong one. “Mary Jones” or “Marianne Jones” would be incorrect. But a correct last name sufficed—or it usually did. The trouble was that Jones was such a common name, like Smith or Black, that someone who didn’t know the answer might have guessed it.
In the end, Jennings could have won the game by betting nothing. Lazerus flubbed the clue, coming up only with “Who is Gail?” a reference to Gail Devers, a gold medal sprinter in the 1992 and 1996 games. She wagered $3,799, which left her with $14,801. It was still more than enough to win if Jennings missed it or if the single name failed to satisfy the judges.
He showed his response: “Who is Jones?” Trebek paused and glanced at the judges. If there had been another prominent female track star named Jones, Jennings, like thousands of others, would have been a one-time loser on America’s most popular quiz show. But the judges knew no other stars named Jones and approved his vague answer. “We’ll accept that,” Trebek said. Ken Jennings won the game and $37,201, becoming the new Jeopardy champion.
Millions of viewers witnessed the drama that June evening. Many of them probably figured that, like most champions, the skinny computer programmer who snuck through in Final Jeopardy would lose the next day or the day after that. In fact, by the time the “Jones” show aired, Jennings was already well into his streak. Jeopardy recorded its games two or three months ahead of time, and Friedman’s team usually taped five games per day—a grueling ordeal for winning contestants. Between games, Trebek and the winner left the stage to change clothes, appearing ten minutes later with a new look—as if it were another day. Within an hour of his first victory, Jennings won again. In two days, he won his first eight games, then headed back to Salt Lake City. During his streak, he commuted between the two cities without disclosing what he was up to. Like all Jeopardy players, and even members of the studio audience, he had signed legal forms vowing not to disclose the results of the games before they aired. His streak was a secret.
As the weeks passed, the games seemed to become easier for him. He grew comfortable with the buzzer, could pick out the hints in the clues and read the signals of his mind. More often than not, Jennings did not just beat his competitors, he blew them away. After the first two rounds of a game, he had usually amassed more than twice the winnings of his nearest rival. This was known as a lock-out, for it rendered Final Jeopardy meaningless. As time passed, Jennings fell into a winning rhythm.
Millions of new viewers tuned into Jeopardy to see the summer sensation. In July, as Jennings extended his streak to thirty-eight games, ratings jumped 50 percent from those of the previous year, reaching a daily audience of fifteen million. Jeopardy rose to be the second-ranked TV show of the month, trailing only the CBS prime-time crime series CSI. In an added dividend for Friedman, Jeopardy’s rise also boosted ratings for its stablemate, Wheel of Fortune, which followed it on many channels.
Jennings, with his choirboy face and awkward grin, was a far cry from the tough guys on CSI. But he was proving to be a cognitive mauler. Some of his fallen opponents (who eventually numbered 148) took to calling themselves Road Kill and produced T-shirts for the growing club. Yet even while Jennings racked up wins he flashed humor, some of it even mischievous. One $200 clue in the category Tool Time read: “This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure-seeker.” Jennings, his knowledge clearly extending into gangsta rap, responded: “What is a ‘ho’?” That produced laughter and oohs and aahs from the crowd. A surprised Trebek struggled briefly for words, finally asking Jennings: “Is that what they teach you in school, in Utah?” His response was ruled incorrect. In fact, it could be argued that Jennings’s gaffe was right—and far more clever than the intended answer (“What is a rake?”). He could have challenged the call, but he was so far ahead it was barely worth the bother.
What was so special about Ken Jennings? First, he knew a lot. A practicing Mormon who had spent his childhood in Korea and had done missionary work in Spain, he knew the Bible and international affairs. He’d devoted himself to quiz bowls much of his life, the way others honed their skills in ice hockey or ballet, and he had a fabulous memory. Still, his peers considered him only an excellent player, not a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. “None of us who knew Ken saw this coming,” said Greg Lindsay, a two-time Jeopardy champ who had crossed paths with Jennings in college quiz bowl tournaments.
Two things, according to his competitors, distinguished Jennings. First, he had an uncanny feel for the buzzer. This wasn’t a mechanical ability but a uniquely human one. Sitting at the production table by the Jeopardy set, a game official waited for Trebek to finish reading the clue, then turned on the panel of lights on the big Jeopardy board. This signaled the opportunity to buzz. Players who buzzed too early got penalized: Their buzzers were locked out for a crucial quarter of a second, opening the door for others to buzz in. Jennings, said his competitors, had an almost magical feel for the rhythm of the buzzmeister. He anticipated the moment almost the way jazz musicians sense a downbeat. “Ken knew the buzzer,” said Deirdre Basile, one of his early victims. “He had that down to a science.”
His second attribute was a preternatural calm under pressure. Like other players, Jennings had a clear sense of what he knew. (This is known as “metacognition.”) But knowing a fact is one thing, locating it quite another. People routinely botch the retrieval process, sometimes hunting for the name of a person standing right in front of them. This problem, known as “tip of the tongue syndrome,” occurs more often when people are stressed—such as when they have less than four seconds to come up with an answer, thousands of dollars are at stake, and they’re standing in front of a television audience of millions.
Bennett L. Schwartz, a psychologist at Florida International University, has studied the effects of emotion on tip of the tongue syndrome. He came up with questions designed to make people anxious, such as, “What was the name of the tool that executed people in the French Revolution?” With beheadings on their mind, he found, people were more likely to freeze up on the answer. Memory works on clues—words, images, or ideas that lead to the area where the potential answer resides. People suffering from tip of the tongue syndrome struggle to find those clues. For some people, Schwartz said, the concern that they might experience difficulty becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I know the answer and I can’t retrieve it,” he said. “That’s a conflict.” And the brain appears to busy itself with this internal dispute instead of systematically trawling for the most promising clues and pathways. Researchers at Harvard, studying the brain scans of people suffering from tip of the tongue syndrome, have noted increased activity in the anterior cingulate—a part of the brain behind the frontal lobe, devoted to conflict resolution and detecting surprise.
Few of these conflicts appeared to interfere with Jennings’s information retrieval. During his unprecedented seventy-four-game streak, he routinely won the buzz on more than half the clues. And his snap judgments that the answers were on call in his head somewhere led him to a remarkable 92 percent precision rate, according to statistics compiled by the quiz show’s fans. This topped the average champion by 10 percent.
As IBM’s scientists contemplated building a machine that could compete with the likes of Ken Jennings, they understood their constraints. Their computer, for all its power and speed, would be a first cousin of the laptops they carried around the Hawthorne lab. That was the technology at hand for a challenge in 2011. No neocortex, no neurons, no anterior cingulate, just a mountain of transistors etched into silicon processing ones and zeros. Any Jeopardy machine they built would struggle mightily to master language and common sense—areas that come as naturally to humans as breathing. Their machine would be an outsider. On occasion it would be clueless, even laughable. On the positive side, it wouldn’t suffer from nerves. On certain clues it would surely piece together its statistical analysis and summon the most obscure answers with sufficient speed to match that of Ken Jennings. But could they ensure enough of these successes to win?
Ken Jennings’s remarkable streak came to an end in a game televised in November 2004. Following a rare lackluster performance, he was only $4,400 ahead of Nancy Zerg, a real estate agent from Ventura, California. It came down to the Final Jeopardy clue: “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.”
The Jeopardy jingle came on, and Jennings put his brain into drive. But the answer, he said, just wasn’t there. He didn’t read the business pages of newspapers. Companies were one of his few weak spots. He guessed, “What is FedEx?” When Zerg responded correctly, “What is H&R Block?” Jennings knew his reign was over. During his streak, he had amassed more than $2.5 million in earnings and became perhaps the first national brand for general braininess since the disgraced Charles Van Doren.
Harry Friedman, of course, was far too smart a producer to let such an asset walk away. A year later, he featured Jennings in a wildly promoted Ultimate Tour of Champions. This eventually brought Jennings into a threesome featuring the two leading money winners from before 2003, when winners were limited to five matches. Both Jerome Vered and Brad Rutter had retired as undefeated champions under the rules at the time. Rutter, who had dropped out of Johns Hopkins University and worked for a time at a music store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had never lost a Jeopardy match.
In the 2005 showdown, Rutter handled both Jennings and Vered with relative ease. He was so fast to the buzzer, Jennings later said, that sometimes the light to open the buzzing didn’t appear to turn on. “It was off before it was on,” he said. “I don’t know if the filaments got warmed up.” In the three days of competition, Rutter piled up 62,000, compared to 34,599 for Jennings and 20,600 for Vered. (These weren’t dollars but points, since they were playing for a far larger purse.) Rutter won another $2 million, catapulting him past Jennings as the biggest money winner in Jeopardy history.
These two, Rutter and Jennings, were the natural competitors for an IBM machine. To establish itself as the Jeopardy king, the computer had to vanquish the best. These two players fit the bill. And they promised to be formidable opponents. They had human qualities a Jeopardy computer could never approach: fluency in language, an intuitive feel for hints and suggestion, and a mastery of ideas and concepts. Beyond that, they appeared to boast computer-like qualities: vast memories, fast processors, and nerves of steel. No tip-of-the-tongue glitches for Jennings or Rutter. But would a much-ballyhooed match against a machine awaken their human failings? Ferrucci and his team could always hope.