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Logical wager for final jeopardy should have been $0. Why did Watson wager $947? Does anyone know?

• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• eggbrain 16y ago
  Well, it's probably a mix of feeling confident in it's ability to answer the Final Jeopardy question (based on previous performances), along with wanting to maximize its score as much as possible, especially considering it has to count that it is a 2 game average, not just one.
• zach 16y ago
  I thought the engineers might be trying to make its score end in a particular number if Watson was correct, as a sort of Easter egg. 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?!
  • lurker17 16y ago
    37628 is a permutation of 32768, which is (1 << 15) as a 16-bit unsigned integer, which is -32768 (minimum possible value) of a signed 16-bit integer in "2's complement" notation.
• aliguori 16y ago
  Because there was still a slim chance that it thought it was right. If it's well ahead, it shouldn't bet $0 unless it knows with absolutely confidence that it's wrong.
  • epanastasi 16y ago
    Wagers are made after the category is shown but before the the clue is revealed. It can only use the confidence in its knowledge of the category, not the question itself.