by disillusioned | 2025-09-13 06:39:47+00:00
There were two astounding takeaways when Watson beat Ken and Brad:

1. We've advanced the state of the art in terms of being able to reason and parse complex language to a level the general population wasn't aware of.

2. Beating humans on the buzzer, of all things, feels intrinsically unfair and there's no graceful way to account for that.

Watson's ability to interpret, correctly, what most of the Jeopardy! "answers" were looking for was a sea change. It really was as big as Deep Blue, the crossing of a frontier we collectively thought would likely be much further in the future, and it was here now: complex clues, difficult to reason out context, and the ability to search its corpus of knowledge and assign a confidence value and then produce accurate results... it was mind blowing.

It's funny because, in a pinch, ChatGPT will answer essentially every Jeopardy! clue correctly every single time now, owing to the specific nature of generative transformers and the advent of attention, specifically. But Watson was pre "attention is all you need!" It was blood, sweat, and tears, and markov chains, and all kinds of craziness. It was a huge swing, and the fact that it actually worked was remarkable.

But back to the buzzer: most people sitting at home probably don't realize that the buzzer is locked out from buzzing in until the host (then Alex, now Ken) completes the read of the clue. At that point, an off-stage producer presses a switch to unlock the buzzers. So prospective players spend their weeks before their tape date spamming a retractable pen in front of the TV trying to nail the timing from the cadence of the host's voice, and hoping they can get it right. Because getting it wrong penalizes you: if you attempt to buzz in before the lock is lifted, your buzzer is individually locked for another 250ms or so. Another producer has a screen that monitors the buzzer activity so they can see if players are habitually buzzing in too early and getting locked, or to monitor for malfunctions, and it's wild to watch it light up like a Christmas tree in the 100 or so last milliseconds of the clue.

This is why you see players spam the buzzer: if they're locked out, the best thing they can do is keep attempting to get back in until the lock lifts. This is also why on rare occasions, you'll see all three players spamming and no one actually getting buzzed in: everyone locked.

So how do you translate this to a computer? The answer was basically to create a makeshift "finger" that would activate the buzzer, but would consistently buzz in at exactly 28ms after the lock cleared... every single time (so long as its confidence was high enough).

I think it's fair to say that there's nothing, at _all_, remarkable about a computer beating a human on a buzzer. It's a signal loop: wait for lock to clear, receive signal lock has cleared, activate buzzer 28ms later. Every device with a stopwatch or timer or clock is more accurate than a human attempting the same timing exercise. It's a solved problem, and not an interesting one. And it disproportionately took the wind out of the sails from the human competitors, who are both the most world-class, best-on-the-planet Jeopardy! players, who were losing by milliseconds to that signal loop.

It's still remarkable Watson was able to successfully answer so many clues correctly and end up winning, but the buzzer aspect was an (intractable) bummer.