(Whoa, are we returning to form with short, on-topic posts?)

IBM has accomplished something impressive by building a computer system that can answer Jeopardy! questions with decent confidence, particularly given the wordplay and nuance for which the show’s writers are known. But if the computer emerges victorious in this week’s exhibition match, does that mean it is “better at Jeopardy”?

Arguably, it does. But not for any really exciting reason.

Over the last week or so, I’ve rambled on a bit at people who will listen (and many who won’t) about the fact that Jeopardy is really two different games.

1. A contest of knowledge. This is, of course, what the show is known for. At its core, Jeopardy is about awarding points to players who know stuff.
2. A contest of reflexes. Viewers often underestimate the importance of speed in any Jeopardy-like game. Speed of recall is important, of  course, but reflexes prove even more important in close games.

(Well, it’s really three different games: Final Jeopardy is almost purely a game theory puzzle, as the optimal wagers are typically independent of a player’s confidence in the category. And it’s actually four different games, if you count an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. …I’ll come in again.)

It’s useful to understand some rules. Players may not buzz in until the host finishes reading the question. (This wasn’t always true, but it does tend to make for better television.) When the question answer is over, somebody off-stage arms the buzzers. This activates a set of lights surrounding the game board, signaling to the players that it is legal to ring in.

Watson is required to physically actuate a button. But that’s still blatantly unfair; it’s undeniable that a computer could easily win a reflex contest against humans. That is why I have a problem with the portrayal of the Watson match as pitting man versus machine in a battle of knowledge and wits. The game outcome purportedly measures Watson’s question-answering (or answer-questioning?) skill, but that characterization is founded on the idea that Jeopardy is purely a game of knowledge.

It’s impossible to know whether Watson is winning the knowledge contest, because it is winning the reflex contest hands-down.

All three players are really, really good at the knowledge contest. Brad and Ken have demonstrated that throughout their nearly 100 combined previous appearances on the show. As for Watson: on the 30 Double Jeopardy clues aired on Tuesday’s show, Watson was confident in the correct answer for 25, had the wrong answer for 1 (“Picasso”), and opted not to buzz in for 4 (on one, the Daily Double, its best guess was correct; on the other three, its best guess was wrong). That’s damned impressive, and a fine achievement. The Jeopardy round was less good, but still impressive: Watson had the right answer for 19 clues, a wrong answer for 5 clues, and abstained from 6 (1 of which, “the 1930s”, would have been correct).

But when all three players know an answer, the game becomes a buzzer race. The popular portrayal of the Jeopardy IBM Challenge gives far too much credit for Watson’s past victories to the question-answering capabilities that IBM has developed.

The last two nights have made it very clear that Watson is absolutely dominant on the buzzer. Of the 29 clues in the Jeopardy round (Daily Double excluded), Watson successfully rang in first on 17 of 24 attempts. Of the 28 Double Jeopardy clues, Watson successfully rang in first on 22 of 25 attempts. In total, Watson rang in first on over two-thirds of all opportunities (39 of the 57 non-DD clues read). During Ken’s 75 regular-season games, he was similarly dominant versus mere humans, ringing in first 61.45% of the time. A significant fraction of those wins presumably were uncontested—coming when neither opponent was attempting to buzz in—a much less common scenario when facing Jeopardy’s greatest champions, making Watson’s .684 average all the more absurd.

Incidentally, how can you tell that the humans are trying and failing to buzz in? As the camera switches back to show the players at their podiums, you can usually see Brad twitch a bit as Watson’s podium lights up. That’s how he buzzes: he’s found that contracting every vaguely-related muscle is faster than trying to move just his thumb or finger. Some players have been known to hold their arms crossed, with the signaling device against their body, so that any arm movement activates it. Ken’s movement is much less pronounced–the best indicator that he was trying to ring in is that he looks frustrated a split-second after he fails. (This happened frequently when Brad pounded him in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions.)

It’s looking increasingly likely that Watson will win in a blowout thanks to its buzzer dominance and the resulting Daily Double opportunities. But news stories that scream “Computer defeats humans on Jeopardy!” give too much credit to the computer by ignoring the aspects of the game that are heavily rigged in its favor.

First, a quick complaint. I recognize that it comes down to a good old-fashioned generation gap, and that I may be requested to evacuate the immediate lawn-like area, but it still catches me off guard how many people of the older generation don’t get video games. At all. They both fail to recognize video games as legitimate media, and fail to recognize that video games have continually evolved over the years to meet the demands of their growing audience. Because they remember that 20 years ago, video games were strongly geared towards children, they continue to labor under the assumption that video games are something to be outgrown. I consider my parents to be technically competent and generally aware of technological trends, yet even they frequently express surprise that I “still” play video games.

My mom is a little better in this respect; she seems to like the idea of the Wii, even if she never actually plays hers, and she had my old DS for a while to play a mahjong game we picked up in Japan. (There’s also her late sister, whose Tetris-playing stamina was nigh legendary.) Maybe with the four major video game platforms now embracing the “family gaming” concept, the DS and Wii having done it for years now, and the Move and Kinect bringing the other two into the fold, we’ll see the old assumptions fade away a bit. There is hope, after all–I don’t think I’ve heard anybody refer to a non-Nintendo game as “playing Nintendo” for a little while now.

With that, let us continue on to a mildly-cliché “end-of-year review”. These were my two favorite games of 2010. As some warning, my tastes are not particularly, er, mainstream, so I haven’t played Gears of God of War Solid: The Sands of Liberty, and don’t intend to. But then, my esoteric choices will be evident shortly.

Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City

This is a game you have never heard of. Unless I’ve told you about it while playing it, or you read Jeremy Parish’s stuff (which maybe you should).

This is not a game with a large target audience. It’s a little old-fashioned. There are no fancy cutscenes, there is no tutorial, and I actually had to read the manual once. On the surface, it’s tedious as all hell: the player is tasked with exploring a vast labyrinth and mapping it—by hand!—on the DS touchscreen, while fighting random battles. As the first few hours tick away, depending on the player’s tastes, this either does turn out to be tedious as all hell (the majority case), or reveals an intricate, elaborate world with fascinating corners to explore and rich details to discover (I guess I’m weird like that). I can think of pretty much one other person I know (a Mr. Legion, of the Connecticut Legions) who would likely fall into the latter camp with me. This is a classic, old-school RPG experience mildly reminiscent of the Bard’s Tale series.

Etrian Odyssey delivers a classic dungeon-crawling experience, yet is informed by a quarter-century of game design wisdom and evolution. There are no sudden deaths lurking around blind corners, no ridiculous Shadowgate-esque kills. Virtually every party death, of which there are plenty, is accompanied by a sense that it was the player’s own fault for getting in too deep, for getting careless and skipping necessary precautions, or for just being downright dumb.

On top of that, the game is beautiful, and the soundtrack is fantastic, with the PC-8801 sound lending it an appropriately retro feel. The music is made pretty distinctive by being full of drums, which is easily missed as they don’t really come across that well on the DS’s tiny speakers. But when fed through headphones, or, say, your computer’s speakers, the music really comes alive:

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

There’s no in-game clock, so it’s hard to know how much sleep I’ve lost diving into the labyrinth under Armoroad. Seven DS batteries is the best estimate I can tender.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Mario Galaxy, unlike Etrian Odyssey, is highly accessible, was widely-advertised, and contains a variety of dissimilar gameplay mechanics. What it has in common with EO is that it doesn’t really bother with plot, per se. What few threads of plot exist are woven weakly into the game, never getting in the way of interesting gameplay mechanics, like combining hot peppers and dinosaurs, and thoroughly confusing children about how gravity works.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The game has shed even what sparse packaging its predecessor had. Gone is the sprawling Mario 64-style overworld that was Rosalina’s observatory, replaced by a lightweight, mildly retro world map for choosing a stage. Interludes laying out backstory for the world are eschewed, most such details being relegated to optional dialogues with NPCs. The result is distilled Mario action with minimal padding added to tie the many disjoint galaxies together into a single package. The game boils down to being an expansion pack of the first Galaxy game, with fresh platforming gimmicks and little tweaks and improvements scattered about. Considering what a solid game Galaxy was, it’s hard to ask for anything more.

Also, the Throwback Galaxy (spoiler alert?) is incredible.

Some of the others

On the puzzle-y front, I finally played World of Goo, which I recommend highly (thanks to the Humble Indie Bundle). I spent far too much time on Manufactoria, a Flash game about Turing machines (no, seriously). Finally, I dropped about 60 hours over two months into Star Ocean: The Last Hope, which is actually a pretty bad game in many ways, but which I am a little ashamed to admit I really enjoyed.

So, did you play anything good this year?

- Juan Williams: It’s not about freedom of speech! Nobody disagrees that he has the freedom to say whatever he wants on TV. What outraged conservatives forget is that NPR has just as much right to fire him for being a dumbass.

- Tim Profitt: It is incorrect to generalize this act of aggression to imply that all {Republicans, Rand Paul supporters, Southerners} are evil head-stomping crazies. It is correct to enjoy as the guy digs a deeper hole with increasingly comical non-apologies.

- Christine O’Donnell: Sure, the Constitution doesn’t literally say “separation of church and state”. But it also doesn’t literally say anything about “health care”, and the Bible doesn’t discuss the literal phrase “choking the chicken”. So I guess those are OK.

- Unnecessary roughness: Sports commentators can’t both applaud the NFL for cracking down on dangerous hits and applaud the Giants defense for knocking QBs out of the game.

- Brad Childress: [15 seconds of laughter]

(Quick, everyone, spot what’s wrong with this reasoning!)

As I tried to resist getting out of bed on Thursday morning, I heard the morning radio show discussing Prop 8 in the wake of Judge Walker’s decision. One of the guests was arguing that equal protection doesn’t apply to marriage because heterosexual couples can procreate, and the state has a vested interest in incentivizing procreation, and hence, heterosexual marriages. I am not making this up; he quoted an e-mail he received from a supporter:

I voted for Proposition 8 not out of any animus or belief that same-sex couples are inferior, but because I believe communities have a vital interest in incentivizing that procreative-capable couplings occur  within stable relationships.

If I’m following this argument correctly, this implies that a ban on same-sex marriage would encourage gay people to somehow become straight and start pumping out babies. Furthermore, it suggests that the state should forbid an infertile person from marrying a fertile one, because it not only creates a couple that cannot procreate, but reduces the available fertile population. Am I missing something about the procreation argument that makes it not completely stupid?

The Prop 8 proponent continued on to claim that children are best raised by their biological parents, because the parents have a “deep-seated biological incentive”. It’s not really clear to me why this bears on gay marriage. If you truly believe that the state should promote, to the extent possible, that children be raised by their biological parents, then doesn’t that make you an opponent of adoption by gay couples, and not of gay marriage, per se? (In fact, it should make you an opponent of adoption by anyone.)

I was happy, at least, that the old argument that gay people threaten the “sanctity” of heterosexual marriage wasn’t trotted out. (At least, not while I was awake.) I see this as a ray of hope that maybe the opposition has realized just how dumb that argument is.

But seriously, all the consternation in the media about Tiger being in some sort of slump is dumb. (I don’t mean to say that anyone here is engaging in that.)

He’ll be back. Remember 2004-ish, when he wasn’t doing so hot? He hadn’t won a major in two years. What happened? Laser show. Relax. Specifically, he made top 5 in ten of the next twelve majors, winning five of them. (Never mind that one where he missed the cut.) He tied for 4th at the Masters and U.S. Open this year, so he’s clearly still Really Good At Golf.