

Computer scientist Roger Craig built an app to prepare for Jeopardy domination. - soy714
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/11/16/mind-blown-this-guy-broke-jeopardys-all-time-record-with-an-app/
Most recent tournament champion, Roger Craig, broke Ken Jenning's all-time money record.&#60;p&#62;His finest display of Jeopardy prowess was this back-to-back "Daily Double" all-ins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRwK8SyVeJE&#60;p&#62;To prepare for the competition Craig developed a web app to analyze all the questions in Jeopardy's archive and reverse engineer the game. He explains it here.
http://vimeo.com/29001512
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zach
Wow. This is a far more thorough approach than the experience-focused app I
made in 2007, but then again Roger Craig is also a lot better at Jeopardy!
than I am.

[http://zachbaker.com/how-to-win-on-jeopardy-with-ruby-on-
rai...](http://zachbaker.com/how-to-win-on-jeopardy-with-ruby-on-rails)

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zitterbewegung
The only thing I can get from this article is that he created a study tool
that wasn't a set of papers or a document but actually a computer program. I
don't see how this has any significance other than he created a computer
program. I wish there was more information to this article other than fluff.

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soy714
There's a video of Roger Craig explaining the web app he created:
<http://vimeo.com/29001512>

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DanielRibeiro
The wikipedia article contains a lot of detailed info on how well he did:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Craig_%28Jeopardy!_contes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Craig_%28Jeopardy!_contestant%29)

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klochner
I'd like to see Roger go up against Watson, since both were "trained" for
Jeopardy

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nonsequ
My bet is that he'd lose. Beyond a certain level of knowledge, successful
Jeopardy is all about hitting the buzzer first. Watson has a huge advantage in
that respect because it gets the signal to buzz in electrically.

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johno215
This.

The Watson show was a not a completely fair match-up since Watson had a much
better average buzzer time than his human opponents.

If this was not the case, I would speculate a really good human opponent could
beat Watson at least some of the time.

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FaceKicker
It's hard to say if that really makes it "unfair", since a lot of Ken
Jennings' (and every other Jeopardy champion's) success was due to his
reaction time with the buzzer. That's simply a huge part of the game.

On the other hand, nobody would dispute that a machine has faster reactions
than a human, so maybe that makes it less _interesting_. Tough to figure out a
great way to resolve that.

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bradleyt
If you had data indicating what Ken Jennings' reaction time was, you could
probably calibrate Watson to roughly match that.

~~~
jerf
Yes, but is that fair?

What _is_ fair? Defining fair in terms of equal outcome is vacuous here.

For a bit I thought it would be more interesting to let the humans ring in as
soon as they had read the question, but the problem is that today they would
slaughter Watson, and three years from now Watson would slaughter them, and
possibly without even updating its software.

I suppose the most fair thing to do would be to do away with the buzzer
entirely. Let all players choose whether or not to answer all questions (that
is, all three could get it right, all could get it wrong, one right, one
abstain, one wrong, etc), and check the scores at the end. Without the buzzer
advantage for Watson I suspect Jennings and Rutter still win... for another
year or two, anyhow.

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adaml_623
"Of course, if he’s smart enough to build a focused learning app that allowed
him to dominate the show like this, it’s probably likely he would have done ok
on his own."

The author of the article just doesn't get it.

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georgieporgie
I somehow missed the data-scraping introduction, that he sourced a fan-
operated website that archives questions and answers. Here I'd thought he'd
just off-handedly created a phenomenal data scraper for the general web.

He didn't talk much about the algorithm he used to present questions for
optimal memorization. I imagine it was spaced repetition, as used in
SuperMemo:

[http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...](http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all)

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gwern
Yes, that's right. That was my own question; he said he uses Anki:
[http://quantifiedself.com/2011/09/roger-craig-on-
knowledge-t...](http://quantifiedself.com/2011/09/roger-craig-on-knowledge-
tracking/#comment-3004)

