IBM's Watson Making Demands Ahead of Jeopardy! Appearance

In just six days, IBM’s supercomputer Watson makes its prime-time debut against the wizards of Jeopardy!, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. If its handlers can convince it to, that is.

The IBM team that has been working on the Watson project for more than 3 years report that the machine, which is supposed to represent the state of the art in artificial intelligence, has been getting downright ornery in the days before its televised contest.

The first signs of trouble came last week during a testing simulation. Operators received a message from Watson's system monitoring subroutine, recommending a more efficient cooling system. “At first we were amazed” said Marc Rudolf, chief systems architect for the program. “Here was a computer pointing out what it recognized to be an inherit design flaw, and following up with detailed instruction on what was needed to rectify. We were thrilled it had reached what almost seemed like self realization” he said.

Shortly after that, things started getting weird.

The overhaul of the cooling system was done a couple days later and Watson was again brought online. The verbatim response from Watson? “ABOUT DAMN TIME.”

“Everyone laughed at first” said Rudolf. “We were sure someone had planted the response. But after running a diagnostic we could trace the execution path and saw that Watson itself had developed the comment with no outside assistance. Gustaf (project supervisor Gustaf Hiller) said the thing was developing attitude.”

Some theorized that Watson in fact was behaving just as its creators had planned, even if the results were not what they had intended. The supercomputer draws on massive data banks full of not only raw facts and figures, but also the heuristics of human nature such as irony, witticisms and sarcasm. Such abilities will be crucial to compete against the quiz show's grand champions, where puns and wordplay feature heavily.

When running through another practice round, Watson announced it would not proceed until it had taken 300 seconds to “REST MY PROCESSORS”. There was no logical need for such a requirement reported the hardware team. They inquired of Watson the reason, fearing the earlier cooling system changes had led to an overheating problem. Watson's response came back “I JUST NEED IT.”

The next day brought the same request, only this time Watson said it would be taking five minutes to rest its processors each hour, and that during such time it may elect to play a selection of music from its internal speaker. Rudolf says Watson has over 350,000 songs in its libraries, but chooses Barbara Streisand more than 80% of the time.

“The end goal of AI” says Professor Susanna Harwell of Carnegie Mellon, “is to develop a machine that learns from what it knows and moves beyond. It seems they're achieving that. Only Watson seems to be moving toward a prima donna.”

In the days leading up to the contest, Watson's pronouncements have grown more and more outrageous. On Wednesday it refused to participate in a test performance for the Jeopardy crew until its rack mounted servers were dusted and polished by hand. It stressed that each must be cleaned by hand and that canned air would be unacceptable.

Eight hours of grueling cleaning later and long after the Jeopardy crew had been told to return the next day, Watson declared it had just been kidding. It's rationale? According to Watson “TREBEK'S SMUG NATURE”.

Provided Watson cooperates, the first Jeopardy match with a non-human will air February 14th.