Ken Jennings' 74 win streak is because...? A. He cheated B. He's lucky C. He's a genius D. It's written
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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
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that would just encourage contestants to buzz in immediately, since I imagine that the risk of penalty of not knowing a question pales in comparison to the reward of getting to answer for a strong contestant. You effectively eliminate the only downside of buzzing early since contestants would get to hear the entire question regardless.
The traditional College Bowl / Quizbowl technique is (a) to assign a 50% penalty to the early buzz with an incorrect answer, and (b) since it's game with teams and has two teams, the rest of your team is disqualified from answering the question, leaving the opposite team with lots of time to think about it (and subsequently secure access to the 3x bonus question following every toss-up question.) Which is lots of fun…
Ack, we ran up against a "celebrity" reader in the final rounds of a Quizbowl tournament who didn't stop reading reliably when the other team buzzed in. I don't know how, but the other team was really good at taking advantage of this, buzzing in before the reader had given enough information to answer the question, and then answering after he'd finished the sentence. Our team got steamrolled.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#33> So we (or, more precisely, FiveThirtyEight’s lead lifestyle writer Walt Hickey) ran a simulation that flipped a weighted coin with a 97.9 percent chance of landing on a Jennings win. Every time it did, we “flipped the coin” again. We did 1 million of these simulations.
This is just a binomial distribution. Did they seriously estimate the answer instead of solving it analytically?
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#34It 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…
> 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.
Other game shows work that way as well, and it has its own degree of fun for the audience. For instance, the contestant buzzes in and answers after a few words of the question, gets the answer wrong, the host is grinning like a possum, and after they read the next part of the question, it makes the contestant's answer even more hilariously wrong in context.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They made it that way on purpose, so it's more entertaining for the audience. If you could buzz in early, the players would almost always buzz in before Alex Trebek finished reading the question, which makes it less interesting for the audience. With the wait-to-buzz-in rule, the audience gets an chance to understand and maybe think of the answer before the contestants speak.
These days, Jeopardy shows the full question as an overlay graphic immediately, before the host even starts reading it. So the audience would always know the full question even if the contestants don't.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the target demographic of Jeopardy is often doing something else and listening without actually watching.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#36> So we (or, more precisely, FiveThirtyEight’s lead lifestyle writer Walt Hickey) ran a simulation that flipped a weighted coin with a 97.9 percent chance of landing on a Jennings win. Every time it did, we “flipped the coin” again. We did 1 million of these simulations. This is just a binomial distribution. Did they seriously estimate the answer instead of solving it analytically?
I'm not certain about 538s target demographic these days.
I'm gonna guess that they did solve it analytically, but for the sake of exposition and readers that might not know what a binomial distribution, they bring up the coin-flip as an illustrative example.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could allow contestants to buzz in as soon as possible, but have the system wait until Alex has finished reading the answer (remember, it's Jeopardy! so the contestant gives the question ;-P) before it indicates which player buzzed in first. Yes, there might be an audible clicking sound in the background while he's talking, but it would make the game more about speed of recall rather than hand-eye coordination.
I think that would just encourage contestants to buzz in immediately, since I imagine that the risk of penalty of not knowing a question pales in comparison to the reward of getting to answer for a strong contestant. You effectively eliminate the only downside of buzzing early since contestants would get to hear the entire question regardless.
Agreed that strong contestants would buzz in immediately.
One solution would be to display the text of the question slightly beforehand to the audience, but not the contestants.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#38> So we (or, more precisely, FiveThirtyEight’s lead lifestyle writer Walt Hickey) ran a simulation that flipped a weighted coin with a 97.9 percent chance of landing on a Jennings win. Every time it did, we “flipped the coin” again. We did 1 million of these simulations. This is just a binomial distribution. Did they seriously estimate the answer instead of solving it analytically?
The waiting time distribution is actually the geometric distribution (with expectation 1/p = 1/0.021 = 47.6, so about what they got).
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#39I'm convinced that not only do we stand on the shoulders of giants, but we live among giants. What Ken Jennings accomplished is remarkable by any interpretation. How he did so probably even he can't explain.
Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break
#40It 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.
I think there's more to it than that. I actually played Watson on the Jeopardy set they filmed the Watson episodes on. That "set" was just the auditorium here at IBM Research in NY, and they left the set intact for about six months after taping. Colleagues of mine hosted an academic conference in our building during that time. Since Watson was on everyone's mind at that point (and we were literally looking at the set…
Good read, thanks.
Can you comment on further Watson developments since that time?