Tag: jeopardy

television

Cracking the Jeopardy! Code

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A few months back, Gawker posted about how one uber-geek named Roger Craig (no, not the retired San Francisco 49er) was able to develop a web app that modeled America’s favorite question and answer show’s question sequences so that he could win an insane amount of money and break their all time record.
Craig delivered this news to the New York “Quantified Self Show & Tell” where he explains how he developed a web tool and various supporting programs to analyze and effectively train himself on a database of past questions. Its a 14 minute talk and its worth watching if you plan to ever be on the show, like I do.
If you did not know, every year I take the entrance exam hoping / praying that this is the year I end up on the show. When I throw out of my many inane pieces of trivia and/or little known facts, I usually follow it up with the statement, “One day I’m going to be on Jeopardy!” to try to reduce my geek factor. That being said, my secret fear is that I’ll get on the show and get destroyed by my lack of opera and classical music knowledge. Having Mr. Craig’s app to help me identify my weak spots would be ideal.
As an aside, one of the best articles I ever read about “Jeopardy!” was written for GQ magazine and it was titled “Why is Alex Trebek laughing at me?” It came out in the late 90’s and I cannot find it online – I was hoping to link to it in this post. If you find it, please let me know!

tech

The First Artificial Contestant on America's Favorite Quiz Show

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Answer: This highly successful television quiz show is the latest challenge for artificial intelligence.
Question: What is “Jeopardy”?
Not content with simply winning at chess, IBM has decided to build a machine that can win at “Jeopardy.” One point that has been decided is that the box will not be hooked up to the net during the match – it will have to reference its memory just like the rest of us. While you might think who cares, it’s brain can be many terabytes in size, just remember the AI has to synthesize the answer and then search this ridiculous amount of data before a human can do the same to figure out the right question. Sounds like a huge query challenge. Because it is.
As Kasparov is to chess, Ken Jennings is to “Jeopardy” so I hope that the AI indeed plays KenJen and that KenJen takes it down to Chinatown…

ramblings

Malta & Yalta

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Do you know the difference between Malta and Yalta? I didn’t except for the fact that they are both small. I didn’t know if one was a city and the other was a country, if it was vice versa, if they were both countries, if they were both islands, etc. I knew one hosted a very important Allied conference during WWII. Which one though? I could never be sure.

Today, Malta came up as a cross word answer in a puzzle I’m doing – “island nation south of Sicily” – I knew the last four letters were alta and I could not decide if it was malta or yalta for about 10 minutes, until i figured out the four letter word for ramble – “roam” – which happened to end where “_alta” began. So, “malta” was the answer to the clue and I decided that I would do some research and figure out once and for all the differences.

After checking with Wikipedia, here is what I found:

MALTA: The Republic of Malta is a small and densely populated island nation in southern Europe. It consists of an archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea directly south of Italy. These strategically located islands have been ruled and fought over by various powers over the centuries. It is finally its own nation, having fully divested itself from Britain, the last nation to hold dominion over it, in 1979 and it joined the EU in 2004.

YALTA: Yalta is a town in the Crimea in southern Ukraine, on the north coast of the Black Sea, that was the site of the Yalta Conference. It has about 77,100 inhabitants (2004). Near Yalta is the Livadia Palace, the former summer palace of the Russian Imperial family, where the conference actually took place. Throughout the Soviet era it continued to be an important resort for the Soviet elite. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has, however, struggled economically.

Who knows? Maybe one or the other or both will be on Jeopardy one day…