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Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

metirish Feb 02 2011 05:43 PM Edited 2 time(s), most recently on Feb 10 2011 12:32 PM

Every now and then the Final Jeopardy! stumps all three contestants , tonights did but they'll be kicking themselves. One had no chance as he had $3200 , middle contestant had $11,200(IIRC) and outside left as you look at the telly had $16,000 . Middle guy bet $8000 , lost and down to $3200 Outside left bet the lot , $16000 , middle guys wins. Final Jeopardy! Of the twenty Presidents elected to a second term two of the three that did not complete that term.

MFS62 Feb 02 2011 05:50 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

I got Nixon and Lincoln immediately. Then my wife and I got into an arguement about strategy. Should the person in the lead go bet a lot if the second place contestant is close? Or bet a little, assuming the second place person will lose? I also noted that if both of them bet a lot, the third place person could have won. (As Alex noted that he was "still in it") I said bet a lot. Wifey said play safe and bet a little. Who is right? LAter

Willets Point Feb 02 2011 05:57 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

McKinley is the third.

dgwphotography Feb 02 2011 06:06 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

MFS62 wrote: I got Nixon and Lincoln immediately. Then my wife and I got into an arguement about strategy. Should the person in the lead go bet a lot if the second place contestant is close? Or bet a little, assuming the second place person will lose? I also noted that if both of them bet a lot, the third place person could have won. (As Alex noted that he was "still in it") I said bet a lot. Wifey said play safe and bet a little. Who is right? LAter I'm thinking the contestant in the lead should have bet no more than what guaranteed a win if he was correct, in this case, $6,401.

Frayed Knot Feb 02 2011 06:09 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

Yeah, Nixon is obviously the easy one. Then the next thing you do is go through the ones who either died in office or were assassinated and Lincoln should come up easily too. After that it gets harder. Of the ones killed, Kennedy doesn't qualify but Garfield & McKinley are most likely hazy in people's minds. I would have guessed McKinley (correctly as it turns out) but would have stewed over it if they wanted all three. He was killed just months into his second term which I remember reading about while riding the train home on 9/11/01 because local boy Teddy Roosevelt assumed the office upon McK's death 100 years ago that week. Of the ones who died naturally, WH Harrison famously lasted just one month and FDR just as famously was in his fourth term. I knew Harding was still in his first term which leaves I think just Zachary Taylor to ponder.

seawolf17 Feb 02 2011 06:17 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

dgwphotography wrote: MFS62 wrote: I got Nixon and Lincoln immediately. Then my wife and I got into an arguement about strategy. Should the person in the lead go bet a lot if the second place contestant is close? Or bet a little, assuming the second place person will lose? I also noted that if both of them bet a lot, the third place person could have won. (As Alex noted that he was "still in it") I said bet a lot. Wifey said play safe and bet a little. Who is right? LAter I'm thinking the contestant in the lead should have bet no more than what guaranteed a win if he was correct, in this case, $6,401. That is correct.

HahnSolo Feb 02 2011 06:48 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

I'm also thinking in this situation, the person in 3rd (with 3200) should stay put and bet $0. The likelihood of them winning is still pretty small, assuming the guy in front would bet just what he needed (as Wolf and DGW noted). However, there is a strong likelihood that the guy in second will bet a lot, and if he's wrong is in danger of falling into last place. IIRC, aren't the second place prizes nicer than those for 3rd place?

seawolf17 Feb 02 2011 06:54 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

In this particular case, the third-place contestant has to hope that BOTH other contestants screw up, because there's really no way he can win. P3, the first-place guy, bets $6401 in just about every case; best case, P1 can't match that even if he's right and P3 is wrong. Betting $0 was my plan on my show; I figured (correctly) that Sheila would bet enough to cover a full wager by me, so I saw that my only realistic hope for second place was to bet nothing and hope that she was wrong, bumping me from the $1,000 third-place prize to the $2,000 second-place prize.

Chad Ochoseis Feb 02 2011 07:15 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

It's interesting to ponder what the second place person should do in that situation. Bet it all - figure that your best chance of winning is to maximize your score, no matter what? Bet a little bit - that way if First Place Guy is wrong and he bets $6,401, you'd win? But if First Place Guy guesses your strategy correctly, then he'll also bet only a little bit, which would guarantee a win whether he's right or wrong.

metirish Feb 02 2011 07:27 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

Alex was shocked when he saw the woman leading had bet it all and was wrong.

Frayed Knot Feb 02 2011 08:11 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

If you're in second and the third place person is out of it, there's essentially four things that can happen in Final Jeopardy: A - both 1st & 2nd get it correct B - 1st gets it right, you get it wrong C - you get it right, 1st place gets it wrong D - both get it wrong The only advantage you have being in 2nd place is that you pretty much know what the leader is going to bet in FJ: enough to match double your total plus one dollar. Assuming that's case (and it usually is) there's no way for you to win if the leader gets the answer no matter how you do or what you bet (eliminating choice A & B above) Where a lot of 2nd place sitters after DJ screw up is they bet their entire wad on FJ figuring that there's little to lose. But the smarter move would be to assume the standard leader's bet and [u:3sczgyfl]calculate where a wrong answer will put him/her[/u:3sczgyfl] and adjust your bet so that a choice D outcome (wrong/wrong) leaves you ahead by at least a buck. This way two of the four possible outcomes make you the winner (C & D) whereas betting the entire pile only gives you one winning outcome (C)

Edgy DC Feb 02 2011 08:49 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia

Another advantage you have is that your money isn't real until you're in first. So first-placey-person has more motivation to be conservative, while you can bet the moon, because you only take it home if you win.

metirish Feb 10 2011 12:34 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Fascinating Nova show last night on PBS about Watson the IBM super computer that will play Jeopardy starting on the 14th. http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622 riveting stuff

MFS62 Feb 10 2011 09:23 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

metirish wrote: Fascinating Nova show last night on PBS about Watson the IBM super computer that will play Jeopardy starting on the 14th. http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622 riveting stuff I hope it doesn't put its answers in the form of a question and gets its electronic ass kicked out. Where's John Connor when we need him? Later

metirish Feb 16 2011 10:23 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Feb 16 2011 10:35 AM

Watson is killing the two top champions from Jeopardy, so much so that there is no fun in it, except maybe the look of disgust on Jennings face.

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Feb 16 2011 10:26 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

The humans are dead.

Frayed Knot Feb 16 2011 12:53 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Watson is obviously quick on the draw, but it gets some weird stuff wrong too. In the airport question last night* it answered 'Toronto' when the category was 'U.S. Cities'. * Which city has it's two largest airports named after a WWII hero and a WWII battle? A: Chicago -- O'Hare & Midway

metirish Feb 16 2011 12:57 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Frayed Knot wrote: Watson is obviously quick on the draw, but it gets some weird stuff wrong too. In the airport question last night* it answered 'Toronto' when the category was 'U.S. Cities'. * Which city has it's two largest airports named after a WWII hero and a WWII battle? yeah that and wagering $475 for some reason.....he does do some strange things. A: Chicago -- O'Hare & Midway

Frayed Knot Feb 16 2011 01:06 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

The wagering figures I'm sure are the result of a built-in risk/reward algorithm where it decides what number gives it the best chance at winning once the status of the other players plus the degree of certainty with the answer are factored in. That the machine isn't confined to betting a round number like humans almost always do isn't surprising. But you gotta figure that a few wires got loose when it throws up Toronto when the category is U.S. cities. You wouldn't think it was even capable of a mistake like that even if it didn't know the answer.

Edgy DC Feb 16 2011 01:41 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

metirish wrote: * Which city has it's two largest airports named after a WWII hero and a WWII battle? A: Chicago -- O'Hare & Midway. I figured Midway Airport was named after the park in Chcago called the Midway.

Ceetar Feb 16 2011 01:46 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Edgy DC wrote: * Which city has it's two largest airports named after a WWII hero and a WWII battle? A: Chicago -- O'Hare & Midway. I figured Midway Airport was named after the park in Chcago called the Midway. Which is why all Circus/fair sections are called midway I believe, pioneered at the Chicago World's Fair.

Nymr83 Feb 17 2011 09:11 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

metirish wrote: Watson is killing the two top champions from Jeopardy, so much so that there is no fun in it, except maybe the look of disgust on Jennings face. The look was well worth it. i enjoyed watching the computer kick ass for a night, now back to not watching Jeopardy. I am curious, has anyone seen the ratings numbers?

Frayed Knot Feb 18 2011 06:32 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Biggest since some Super-Championship match they held almost five years ago - one which, probably not coincidentally, involved the same two humans.

Edgy DC Feb 18 2011 07:06 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

So was the computer fed the questions as pure data or did it have to interpret them through sophisticated voice recognition and text recogniton software?

Fman99 Feb 18 2011 08:53 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

I'd like to publicly challenge IBM's Watson to a jerking-off contest. I think I can take him.

Frayed Knot Feb 18 2011 09:28 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Edgy DC wrote: So was the computer fed the questions as pure data or did it have to interpret them through sophisticated voice recognition and text recogniton software? I think the deal is that he was fed data supposedly at the same time as the humans were hearing it. If Watson reached a certain threshold of confidence (70% or so) he rang in, if not he didn't - except of course for Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy. The kind of cool part is that you got to see his top three answers (whether he rung in or not) with a bar graph showing his level of confidence. Sometimes answers #2 and #3 were way off the beaten track or only tangentially related to the question. Bottom line was: he/it was usually right and frequently he beat the humans to the buzzer while one or both were desperately trying to ring in. He got wrong answers only occasionally and had it right (acc. to bar graph) but didn't ring in first about as often.

Edgy DC Feb 19 2011 06:17 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

It seems then that that's a type of advantage. I'd be more impressed if it was working off of electronic eyes and ears. Part of our slowness on the buzzer as humans is that part of our brain is devoted to processing language.

Ceetar Feb 19 2011 06:46 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

I enjoyed boggling at some of the weird "top 3" answers he had. one that Ken actually managed to buzz in first "It's a poor workmen who blames these." don't remember the third but it was 1 tools 2 Yogi Berra

metirish Feb 19 2011 06:48 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

the Nova show I linked explained a lot but to add to FK's post a big part of the problem solving for the Watson team was the fact that he could not hear, so in the process of tuning him for the show he often buzzed in with the same wrong answer that we all just heard the first contestant give, they then designed an algorithm that fed him the wrong answers as they happened, that was a huge breakthrough for the team as Watson was able to learn from the wrong answers and in the practice rounds his win rate shot up after that.

seawolf17 Feb 20 2011 06:36 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

The Yogi response came up in the category "famous sayings," so when you put it in that context, it's not too strange that Yogi would come up in Watson's "thinking" there. The buzzer -- on the show -- is a huge fuckin' deal. That's why I lost, mostly; because Dave, with two games' experience, had the timing down. If you're taking that timing out of the equation -- getting in sync with the guy who turns on the signaling devices after Alex's last word and then clickclickclickclick -- then it's a matter of who can process information faster, and of course a computer's going to be able to do that.

themetfairy Feb 20 2011 07:16 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

D-Dad, the boys and I finally had the chance to sit down and watch the Watson episodes this evening. It was fascinating. I still want to know how Watson came up with Toronto as a U.S. city, though. The data processing missed something there....

Frayed Knot Feb 20 2011 07:33 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Watson got confused because every movie he's seen that's set in NYC he recognizes Toronto landmarks. After that it was only a matter of time until his circuits assumed that the city had been moved to the U.S.A.

Kong76 Feb 20 2011 07:35 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

I think the Toronto thing was thrown in to add drama. Great computer knows everything and in the end doesn't know Toronto's in Canada ... duh.

Ceetar Feb 20 2011 07:38 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

themetfairy wrote: D-Dad, the boys and I finally had the chance to sit down and watch the Watson episodes this evening. It was fascinating. I still want to know how Watson came up with Toronto as a U.S. city, though. The data processing missed something there.... I would love to read the programming/schematic behind how it works. It definitely didn't use the categories to the fullest. For instance, in the "computer keys" category, it gave an answer that was not a key.

metirish Feb 20 2011 07:40 PM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Watch the Nova show I linked to see how it all came together.....there , that is the last time I am going to say that .

themetfairy Mar 02 2011 07:45 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

My Congressman beat Watson at Jeopardy!

Ceetar Mar 02 2011 07:48 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

themetfairy wrote: My Congressman beat Watson at Jeopardy! I saw Ken Jennings link that. Cool, even if it was just a round. He's also apparently a 5-time champion and a nuclear physicist or something. I never knew. (I'm not even sure of my congressmen, so that's not surprising) What's he doing in politics?

themetfairy Mar 02 2011 07:53 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Ceetar wrote: themetfairy wrote: My Congressman beat Watson at Jeopardy! I saw Ken Jennings link that. Cool, even if it was just a round. He's also apparently a 5-time champion and a nuclear physicist or something. I never knew. (I'm not even sure of my congressmen, so that's not surprising) What's he doing in politics? He's definitely not your stereotypical politician. Rush is very humble and quiet; I believe he's truly committed to public service.

Chad Ochoseis Mar 02 2011 08:15 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Someone who works in my office park has this bumper sticker: My Congressman REALLY IS a rocket scientist! RUSH HOLT

themetfairy Mar 02 2011 09:39 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Chad Ochoseis wrote: Someone who works in my office park has this bumper sticker: My Congressman REALLY IS a rocket scientist! RUSH HOLT I think I need one of those :)

Edgy DC Mar 02 2011 09:43 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Holt, like John McCain, had actually appeared on the show back in the Art Fleming days.

themetfairy Mar 13 2011 06:09 AM Re: Final Jeopardy! Trivia - All Purpose Thread

Friends, not foes, in science Sunday, March 13, 2011 Lauren Zumbach SPECIAL TO THE TIMES Although U.S. Rep. Rush Holt outplayed IBM's supercomputer Watson in a recent "Jeopardy!" matchup, there were no hard feelings when the Democratic congressman from Hopewell Township and David Ferrucci, lead researcher on the Watson/DeepQA project, spoke at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory yesterday. Holt, a former assistant director of PPPL, was on familiar ground as he introduced Ferrucci. The final speaker in a series designed to expose students to cutting-edge research, Ferrucci drew a crowd of 525 Princeton-area students and community members. While a computer that plays "Jeopardy!" may sound like a purely fun experiment, Ferrucci said the underlying problem of designing computer systems capable of understanding natural human language has great potential. "We wanted to push the challenge of natural language understanding in a way that challenges us scientifically but also opens a dialogue with the public and puts us in a position to move forward into applications," Ferrucci said. While Watson uses natural language processing to answer game-show questions, the same technology could be used in medical diagnosis, finance, government and tech support. Ferrucci said only a small amount of the effort was specific to "Jeopardy!" "It's empowering the doctors because it brings so much information from so many different sources to bear on the evaluation of each patient." A pilot diagnostic tool could be available in as short a time as 18 months. When the IBM team approached the project in 2007, the task seemed daunting. On a test based on past "Jeopardy!" questions, the show's human winners answered half the available questions and got 85 to 95 percent right. A then state-of-the-art computer system managed just 15 percent correct. Simply hardwiring common answers in wouldn't have been an effective strategy, given the diversity of topics and ways of asking questions in a "Jeopardy!" game, Ferrucci explained. More important, it wouldn't have accomplished the team's real goal of creating computers that learn from the ever-increasing stock of knowledge available in natural language, but incomprehensible to machines. After four years of research, Watson is light years ahead of its predecessors. Watson's performance on the tests is comparable to that of human winners, and it famously defeated "Jeopardy!" grand champion Ken Jennings. For Ferrucci, one of the key lessons and a primary reason IBM took on the project was to demonstrate the importance of pushing science into new territory. "You really can't anticipate all the value that comes from taking risks and exploring something you need to learn more about," he explained. That's why Holt thinks Watson's fame is a great opportunity to increase support for scientific research. Holt said he hopes public interest in Watson can spark a national debate on the importance of scientific research. "Research is under attack, and I don't think that's too strong a word," he said. "What stands behind this really enticing, exciting computer science work is a sense of the value of investment. It has been what has made this country economically successful, and it has improved the quality of life of so many Americans. That's what's at stake."