kottke.org on Jeopardy

On Jeopardy today, a contestant named Ethan responded incorrectly to a $1000 clue with "What is kottke.org?"

The best part is how disgusted the viewer is..."Are you freaking kidding me? Oh jeeezz..." Ethan, if you're out there and if there was actually such an item, I would totally send you a kottke.org tote bag for working in a reference to kottke.org on a show that has such a storied past on the site. What a lovely 13th birthday present. (thx, justin)

What is a Jeopardy playing supercomputer?

After pretty much solving chess with Deep Blue, IBM is building a computer called Watson to beat human opponents at Jeopardy. It's not quite at Ken Jennings' level, but it's holding its own versus lesser humans.

Deep Blue was able to play chess well because the game is perfectly logical, with fairly simple rules; it can be reduced easily to math, which computers handle superbly. But the rules of language are much trickier. At the time, the very best question-answering systems -- some created by software firms, some by university researchers -- could sort through news articles on their own and answer questions about the content, but they understood only questions stated in very simple language ("What is the capital of Russia?"); in government-run competitions, the top systems answered correctly only about 70 percent of the time, and many were far worse. "Jeopardy!" with its witty, punning questions, seemed beyond their capabilities. What's more, winning on "Jeopardy!" requires finding an answer in a few seconds. The top question-answering machines often spent longer, even entire minutes, doing the same thing.

Final Jeopardy blog

The Final Jeopardy blog posts a video each day's Final Jeopardy question. (thx, daniel)

Mark Gaberman on what it's like to

Mark Gaberman on what it's like to write for Jeopardy, which he's been doing for 7 years.

I've had Alex Trebek rap Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" -- he had his mind on his money and his money on his mind that day. Did a category called "Death and Texas" just because I liked the title (and finding stuff about people dying and/or getting killed in Texas turned out to be remarkably easy). I've learned about Jean Sibelius, and word to the wise, if you see "blah blah blah this Finnish composer blah blah blah...", Jean Sibelius might not be your worst guess. Well, at least if I wrote it. I'm just not that up on my Finnish composers.

This comes from a blog called Why We Write, a collection of essays by TV and film writers who are currently out of work due to the Writer's Guild strike. My favorite part of the site is the placement of two spaces after a period instead of the HTML default of one. View the source to check out the crazy markup they use to accomplish that little bit of fussiness. (thx, mark)

For the first time ever, a three-way

For the first time ever, a three-way tie occurred on Jeopardy. The leader going into Final Jeopardy bet to tie so that his competitors would take home big prize money instead of meager 2nd/3rd place winnings. I'm surprised there's not more collusion of this sort on the show...although I guess there would be some prisoner's dilemma issues. (thx, danny)

Update: The aforementioned leader has a post about the tie on his blog.

Fascinating list of terms that Jeopardy fans

Fascinating list of terms that Jeopardy fans use to describe the game and different betting strategies. (via thih)

Jeopardy king Ken Jennings has a blog. (thx, matt)

Jeopardy king Ken Jennings has a blog. (thx, matt)