Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
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Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
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Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#2Unless you're a computer.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#3Unless you're a computer.
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Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#4It never occurred to me that optimized buzzer timing was such a big part of Watson's dominance. Kinda takes some of the romance out of it.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#5Ken Jennings' 74 win streak is because...?
A. He cheated B. He's lucky C. He's a genius D. It's written
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#6It never occurred to me that optimized buzzer timing was such a big part of Watson's dominance. Kinda takes some of the romance out of it.
Yeah, it definitely wasn't as impressive as it seemed on the surface. A much better test of Watson's performance would have been QuizBowl, where contestants can buzz in while the question is still being read.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#7It never occurred to me that optimized buzzer timing was such a big part of Watson's dominance. Kinda takes some of the romance out of it.
Something I never liked about jeopardy is that you can't buzz in at any time.
I played on a trivia team at the high school level, and most questions were structured like:
"This American architect, born in 1867, is known for works such as the Robie House, the Guggenheim Museum, and Fallingwater."
So they typically feed you information from least to most well known, and you can buzz in at any time. This rewards players who know the most trivia. Everyone who played knows Frank Lloyd Wright did Fallingwater, but a very good player would know his approximate date of birth and would buzz in immediately on hearing 1867.
I understand that this might make Jeopardy less fun for the audience, but I feel it would be a better test of trivia instead of buzzer timing.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#8It never occurred to me that optimized buzzer timing was such a big part of Watson's dominance. Kinda takes some of the romance out of it.
Something I never liked about jeopardy is that you can't buzz in at any time. I played on a trivia team at the high school level, and most questions were structured like: "This American architect, born in 1867, is known for works such as the Robie House, the Guggenheim Museum, and Fallingwater." So they typically feed you information from least to most well known, and you can buzz in at any time. This rewards players…
With Jeopardy questions, you'd buzz in at "This American architect..."
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#9It never occurred to me that optimized buzzer timing was such a big part of Watson's dominance. Kinda takes some of the romance out of it.
Yeah, it definitely wasn't as impressive as it seemed on the surface. A much better test of Watson's performance would have been QuizBowl, where contestants can buzz in while the question is still being read.
They also restricted the clues compared to what they would normally have - no audio/video Daily Doubles. I think there might have been some other restrictions, but I don't recall the exact rules. I think they didn't allow any of the "special" categories they sometimes have.
They also did some other tricks, like giving Watson a parsed ASCII stream of the clue, rather than making it see the screen and parse it out. I think it also got an electronic feed of the "you can buzz in now signal" rather than making it parse out the same light the contestants see.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#10It never occurred to me that optimized buzzer timing was such a big part of Watson's dominance. Kinda takes some of the romance out of it.
> And when Jennings went up against IBM’s Watson in a special competition, the computer’s biggest advantage was not its knowledge base but rather an optimized buzzer timing
So the computer's most effective weapon against Jennings was a 555 timer? That's cute.