"By then the preparations for a future televised Jeopardy! contest with IBM's creation were well underway, but this was the first time Trebek would encounter the technology in person, and his approval was crucial. Ferrucci was eager to show off one element in particular: the display, which had been rigged to show Watson's top three guesses whenever it answered, along with the numerical confidence rate it had in each one."
"For Ferrucci, this feature was central to demonstrating the computer's language-processing capabilities, because it showed that Watson wasn't just spitting out answers-it was reasoning. If Watson were ever going to be deployed to industries like health care, its human users wouldn't just want to know its best guess. It would be infinitely more valuable to know if Watson was 95 percent confident or just 30 percent, and whether those confidence levels were in line with its actual accuracy rate."
One morning in 2010 Alex Trebek visited the IBM campus to inspect Watson, the system developed by David Ferrucci's team to compete on Jeopardy!. Trebek watched multiple practice games and later hosted two more himself. Ferrucci configured a display to show Watson's top three guesses and numerical confidence for each answer. The confidence display was intended to demonstrate that Watson reasoned rather than merely produced answers and to communicate certainty to human users. Accurate confidence calibration was emphasized as essential for real-world deployments such as health care. The display also improved audience comprehension during demonstrations when Watson declined to ring in due to low confidence.
Read at Slate Magazine
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