It looked like it might be 658, which spells "BSG" upside-down on a calculator. Now that would be a great moment in geek history, hiding a Battlestar Galactica reference with a calculator message using a computer on Jeopardy!
Alas, the number it was betting towards was 37,628, which (at the risk of paraphrasing Hardy) is not a very interesting number. Or is it?!
Also, the "gee, it could be wordplay" aspect is a convenient excuse. First off, Final Jeopardy rarely has cutesy categories.
Plus, we know they mined the J-Archive. (Aside: has anyone else? Got a zipfile? I would love it.) I mean, look at this, it's not like "U.S. Cities" is an obscure category, even counting only Final Jeopardy! appearances:
http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=1680 http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=695 http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=132 http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2040 http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=2034 http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=3107 http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=287 http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=691
There are probably more but you get the idea. Any category that comes up that often is going to be pretty indicative of the subject, and Watson can see that the responses in this category pretty strongly fit the subject.
How are you getting that idea? It didn’t bet much because it wasn’t at all confident, we don’t know what it would have done if it had been more confident.
Watson likes to play it safe, though, as can be seen in this demo game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgYSv2KSyWg&t=20m26s (I skipped ahead to Final Jeopardy.)
He was $16,000 ahead but one of the contestants could get within $1,600 by betting all of his money. So, naturally, Watson bet only $1,599 even though it was very confident (and ultimately got the answer right). That secured Watson’s win, no matter what the others did. (This is really not impressive or anything like that, if all you want to do is win the game, that’s what you do. Basic game theory.)
Who was to say, that the machine, having been endowed with the very spirit of man, did not deserve a fair trial?
How we deal with this technology is going to have ramifications that we can't even imagine. Are humans to become pets or shall we take part in the next 1000 years of growth? It comes down to how this technology is used.
Sometimes, the category names do limit the range of possible answers. The humans can figure out when a category name contains irony or a pun. Watson can't, so it can't figure out that a category like "US Cities" is dead earnest.
What surprises me is his explanation about that the lack of a clear subject in the text, such as "This US city...", made the question that much more difficult for Watson. My understanding is that Watson is specifically designed to answer Jeopardy questions (question Jeopardy answers?), which often only vaguely refer to a subject with "it" or "this." Based on its performance earlier in the game, I would have thought that Watson's NLP would have had little problem with the question.
