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?!
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.
Comments
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?!
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.