Cracking the Jeopardy! Code
Posted onA 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!