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Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

fivethirtyeight.com

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Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#41

Post by Steko »

> Here’s how we figured this out. We assumed that Jennings headed into Final Jeopardy with at most one other player in contention to win. Then we assumed that in order for Jennings to lose, this sequence of events has to happen: The game must not be locked up, Jennings must get the Final Jeopardy question wrong, and the other contender must get it right. We used his stats across all 75 of his games, not just his 74 wins, to better reflect his overall skills. The probability he doesn’t have the game locked up is 13.3 percent, the probability he gets Final Jeopardy wrong is 32 percent, and the probability the other contender gets it right is 49 percent. When we combine these probabilities, we see that Jennings only has about a 2.1 percent chance of losing.

This is incorrect and overstates his dominance because (1) it assumes Jennings will be ahead, something that won't always happen against Rutter/Jennings/Collins/Chu/Craig level players and (2) the lock up and opponent knowing Final Jeopardy conditions are not independent.

Pretty sloppy basic probability by 538 and make me think I'm not missing much by not subscribing (they didn't offer full RSS last I checked).

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#42

Post by scott_s »

fmela wrote: post #40
scott_s wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, as I am a spectator to the technology. I work on other things. (Parallel and distributed systems and languages for online stream processing.)

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#43

Post by taejo »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #34
gamegoblin wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

> 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 th…

University Challenge in the UK is a great example of this.

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#44

Post by Svip »

curun1r wrote: post #15
fsk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The problem with this solution is it would then become the optimal strategy to simply buzz as soon as the answer is being read in the hopes you know the question once the host has finished reading the answer. That would make the game far less interesting for everyone involved.

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#45

Post by Someone »

taejo wrote: post #43
JoshTriplett wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

University Challenge in the UK is a great example of this.

And as a bonus, the host may grin like a possum when the answer is correct, too. That happens on trivia questions, such as on winners of the Eurovision Song Contest. Contestants are supposed to be British students, know their Shakespeare and recognize 13th century music from four notes played, even if they are studying, say, analytic chemistry. You may get a snide remark "Aren't you ashamed to know that?"

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#46

Post by jdoerrie »

monochromatic wrote: post #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?

Given that we stop after the first failure technically this should be a negative binomial distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_binomial_distribution) with p = 0.979 and r = 1. The mean is p / (1-p) = 46.62. Also there is a p ^ 75 = 0.204 chance that someone of same skill will achieve a better score.

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#47

Post by gabemart »

curun1r wrote: post #15
fsk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> You could allow contestants to buzz in as soon as possible, but have the system wait until Alex has finished reading the answer

I think one of the reasons Jeopardy! is so popular is that it makes the audience feel smart. I'm not amazing at trivia, but I know most of the Jeopardy! answers and having the contestants wait to buzz in creates the illusion that I'm doing as well / better than they are. Even though I'm intellectual aware of the importance of buzzer timing, it still feels good to watch and give the answers before the contestants have a chance to demonstrate they know. Compare that to a trivia show like University Challenge in the UK, where not only are the questions remarkably hard, the contestants buzz in before I've had a chance to parse, let alone answer, the questions.

I think allowing contestants to buzz in early, even if Alex finished reading the question before they could answer, would make Jeopardy! a better trivia game but a worse TV show.

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#48

Post by [deleted] »

curun1r wrote: post #15
fsk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#49

Post by eru »

femto wrote: post #10
jMyles wrote: post #4

It 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.

Only because the rest was already optimized.

Re: Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible to Break

#50

Post by danieltillett »

gabemart wrote: post #47
curun1r wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

> You could allow contestants to buzz in as soon as possible, but have the system wait until Alex has finished reading the answer I think one of the reasons Jeopardy! is so popular is that it makes the audience feel smart. I'm not amazing at trivia, but I know most of the Jeopardy! answers and having the contestants wait to buzz in creates the illusion that I'm doing as well / better than they are. Even though I'm in…

This is spot on. Jeopardy is 100% a TV show. I also have to agree with you about University Challenge - you are doing well if you can answer a 1/4 of the questions. I have always wondered who is the audience for this show as it is more like a sporting event than a quiz show.
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