Alex Trebek/What is today's post about?

(ADDED on Nov 23: Ken Jennings will be an interim host for Jeopardy, see here.)

 Alex Trebek, long time host of the TV show Jeopardy! (the exclamation point is part of the name, though I will omit it for the rest of the post), passed away in November of 2020 at the age of 80. He announced he had pancreatic cancer in March 2019.

0) Here is a pointer to a page that has all of our posts with the word Jeopardy in them. Some are about the show and others mention the show in passing. All of the posts relate to the TV show. That is because Lance and I lead fairly safe lives.

1) On April Fools day of 1997 Pat Sajak hosted Jeopardy and Alex Trebek hosted Wheel of Fortune. Both are on You tube: Trebek hosts wheel, Pat hosts Jeopardy Alex's hosting was more fun because- well, you can see for yourself. 

2) Aside from that one day, Alex Trebek hosted Jeopardy every night since he began in 1984. 

3) My favorite pangram (sentence that has all 26 letters) is

Watch Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game show. 

(See my post on natural pangrams here for... more natural pangrams and a discussion of what natural means.) 

It's my favorite since I can really imagine someone saying it. The show should have used it for its tagline. And now they can't :-(

4) From Alex's comments he seems to like high scoring games that are not run-a-ways. He also likes when people bet big on the daily doubles and on final Jeopardy.  I think he liked having long win streaks like Ken Jenning's  and James Holzhauer, but see point 7 below.  I think he didn't like it when people go for the high scoring questions first (perhaps looking for the Daily Double) since sometimes the category name is not quite clear (e.g., Country Groups could be things like NATO or things like The Charlie Daniels Band) so you want to do a cheap question to get your feet wet, and also easier for the audience to see what the category means.  IMHO they should really make the Daily Double Uniformly distributed on all the squares instead of having it tend to be the bigger-money questions. 

5) When the final Jeopardy category is  revealed he sometimes says that's a  good category! or that sounds hard.  Makes me wonder that if he makes no comment he is thinking that's a stupid category  or Gee that's easy.

6) Because of the pandemic they could not, for a while, make new shows. Hence  they aired old shows including the  first ever Alex-Trebek-Jeopardy (the show had been hosted by Art Fleming and the Trebek-version was really a reboot). From that show I found out WHY it's called Jeopardy (a question I had never thought about). It's because if you get an answer WRONG you can LOSE money- that's the Jeopardy. Not really a good name, but by now everyone knows the show by that name.

7) Art Fleming also died of pancreatic cancer, back in 1995 (he was 70). Coincidence? Well, yes, though two game show hosts of the same show dying of the same disease 25 years apart could be the premise of a really bad murder mystery. 

8) Alex makes some small talk with the contestants  (though some is edited for time). Things like I hear you have a book on muffins that is not a cookbook-- what's that all about?' I wonder if during Ken Jenning's 74-long winning streak, towards the end,  Alex ran out of things to ask him. I can imagine I hear you're pretty good at Jeopardy.

9) I wonder how good Alex would be playing Jeopardy. When he hosted Wheel of Fortune he said in passing that he would NEVER go on Jeopardy as a contestant, so he doesn't think he would do well. He could be wrong about that since over time they ask questions that are not quite repeats but draw on the same knowledge- and he's heard all of them. However, it could be that he is too busy concentrating on other things to really absorb all of this knowledge. 

10) The we give the answers you give the questions is a bit odd. However, in my classes I  sometimes say  We'll Trebek this - we know what the answer is, we have to find the question.

11) This youtube video is of a contestant singing WORDS to the Jeopardy theme song that he wrote.The contestant  refers to Jon Stewart as having also written words to the Jeopardy theme, but I can't find that anywhere- if you can, let me know. 

12) Weird Al did a novelty song about Jeopardy using Art Fleming in the video (see  here)  I always hoped he would update it and use Alex Trebek. He never did and now he can't :-( OR-with todays technology maybe he can. Here's hoping!

13) Alex Trebek was in a category by himself!

Explain this Scenario in Jeapardy and some more thoughts

In the last post I had the following scenario:

Larry, Moe, and Curly are on Jeopardy.

Going into Final Jeopardy:

Larry has $50,000, Moe has $10,000, Curly has $10,000

Larry bets $29,999, Moe bets $10,000, Curly bets $10,000

These bets are ALL RATIONAL and ALL MATTER independent of what the category is. For example, these bets make sense whether the category is THE THREE STOOGES or CIRCUIT LOWER BOUNDS.

Explain why this is.

EXPLANATION: You were probably thinking of ordinary Jeopardy where the winner gets whatever he gets, and the losers take-home is based ONLY on their rank (2000 for second place, 1000 for first place). Hence Larry's bet seems risky since he may lose 29,999 and Moe and Curly's bets seem irrelevant (or barely relelvent- they both want to finish in second)

BUT- these are Larry, Moe, Curly, The Three Stooges. This is CELEBRITY JEOPARDY! The rules for money are different. First place gets MAX of what he wins, and 50,000. So Larry has NOTHING TO LOSE by betting 29,999.  Second and Third place BOTH get MAX of what they win and 10,000. So Moe and Curly have NOTHING TO LOSE by betting 10,000. (I suspect they do this because the money goes to a charity chosen by the celebrity).

SIDE NOTE: I saw Celebrity Jeopardy and wanted to verify the above before posting. So I looked on the web for the rules for Celebrity Jeopardy. THEY WERE NO WHERE TO BE FOUND! A friend of mine finally found a very brief you-tube clip of Penn Jillette wining  Celeb Jeopardy and a VERY BRIEF look at the final scores and how much money everyone actually got. Thats how I verified what I thought were the rules for celebrity jeopardy.

IF I am looking up a theorem in Recursive Ramsey theory and can't find it on the web I am NOT surprised at all since that would be somewhat obscure (9 times out of 10 when I look up something in Ramsey Theory it points to one of the Ramsey Theory Websites that I maintain. Usually is there!). But the rules for final Jeopardy -- I would think that is not so obscure. Rather surprised it was not on the web.

AI in Jeopardy

John Markoff writes in the Times about IBM's plans to create a computer contestant for the Jeopardy TV game show. Jeopardy is a basic knowledge and trivia show with few gimmicks (beyond giving questions for answers instead of vice-versa) which is probably why the show has endured so long. The issue for the computer is not knowledge (one could download the entirety of Wikipedia on a USB drive) but of properly interpreting the question.

Back in my NEC days, some of the AI folks there wrote a similar program for the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, although the program was never considered for use on the real show. Unlike Jeopardy, Millionaire had multiple choice answers and their program basically did keyword matching on Google searches. Their program did quite well on the very specific high-dollar questions. But their program often stumbled on the low-dollar easy questions which relied on basic knowledge.

This Jeopardy computer experiment still seems to me comparing apples to oranges. Humans have little trouble interpreting the meaning of the "answers" in Jeopardy, they are being tested on their knowledge of that material. The computer has access to all that knowledge but doesn't know how to match it up to simple English sentences. I suspect the computer will win this fight for it has the ultimate Jeopardy advantage: it can buzz in faster.

I don't do that well when the Jeopardy category is Math

Bill and Darling are watching Jeopardy.

DARLING: Bill, one of the categories is MATH TALK. You will kick butt!

BILL: Not clear. I doubt they will have the least number n such that R(n) is not known. They will ask things easy enough so that my math knowledge won't help.

DARLING: But you can answer faster.

BILL: Not clear. 

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Recall that in Jeopardy they give the answers and you come up with the question.

Like Sheldon Cooper I prefer my questions in the form of a question. 

Even so, I will present the answers that were given on the show (that sounds funny), then 

I will provide the questions (that sounds funny), what happened, and what I would have gotten right. 

$400

ANSWER: Its a demonstrably true mathematical statement; Calculus has a ``Fundamental'' one.

QUESTION: What is a Theorem?

WHAT HAPPENED: Someone buzzed in and said AXIOM. This one I knew the answer and would have won!

$800

ANSWER: Fire up the engines of your mind and name this solid figure with equal and parallel circles at either end. 

QUESTION: What is a Cylinder?

WHAT HAPPENED: Someone buzzed in with the correct answer. I had a hard time parsing this one and only got it right in hindsight. This one I would have lost on. Note that the phrase Fire up your engines is supposed to make you think of Fire on all cylinders. This did not help me.

$1200

ANSWER: Multiply the numerator of one fraction by the denominator of another (and vice versa) to get the ``cross'' this. 

QUESTION: What is a Product?

WHAT HAPPENED: I got this one very fast. So did the contestant on the real show. Not clear what would happened if I was there.

$1600

ANSWER: See if you can pick off this term for the point at which a line or curve crosses an axis. 

QUESTION: What is an Intercept?

WHAT HAPPENED: Someone buzzed in with the correct answer. I really didn't know what they were getting at. Even in hindsight the answer does not seem right, though I am sure that it is. The phrase pick off this term is  supposed to remind me of something, but it didn't. Lance happened to read a draft of this post and did the obvious thing: asked ChatGPT about it. ChatGPT said that in football a pick off is an interception. To see the ChatGPT transcript see here.

$2000

ANSWER: In 19-5=14 19 is the minuend; 5 is this other ``end''

QUESTION: What is a  Subtrahend?

WHAT HAPPENED: Someone buzzed in with the correct answer. The answer was news to me. It is correct; however, I am not embarrassed to say I never heard these terms. Spellcheck thinks that minuend and subtrahend words. This is similar to when I was not smarter than a fifth grader (see blog post here). 

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So the final tally:

The $400 question I would have gotten right

The $1200 question I might have gotten right if I was fast on the buzzer

But that's it. Why did I do so badly? 

1) Two of the ones I got wrong were phrased in funny ways. I thought so anyway. And note that they did not use advanced math knowledge, so my math knowledge didn't help. (This is not a complaint- it would be bad if they used advanced math knowledge. Like when a crossword puzzle my wife was working on wanted  Log-Man and it began with N and I knew Napier. Why was that in a crossword puzzle for laypeople? Because  Napier has a lot of vowels in it.)

2) One of them I really did not know the math knowledge. Is it arrogant to say that if there is a math question on Jeopardy where I don't know the answer then its a bad question? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. 

On questions about  presidents, vice presidents, or American history, I do well.

On questions about novelty songs  (sometimes comes up) I do very well. (One question was about this song here. The question: here.)

But math... not so much. 

For computer science questions I also do not do that well, but I've learned some common abbreviations that I did not know: 

BIT: Binary Integer (A reader named Anonymous, who makes many comments, pointed out that BIT is actually Binary Digit. I have a possibly false memory of Jeopardy telling me Binary Integer. Either my memory is wrong or Jeopardy is wrong. But Anonymous is right- its Binary Digit.) 

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language

FORTRAN: Formula Translation

Those were more interesting than learning about minuend and subtrahend, terms I had never heard before and won't hear again unless I catch a rerun of Jeopardy (at which time I will get it right).

Three Questions that I think Watson would have trouble with

Here are two questions that were on Jeopardy (the shows slogan: Watch "Jeopardy!", Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game show!) that I do not think Watson would have gotten right. I have added a third that I also think Watson would not have gotten right. What do you think?

QUESTION ONE: The FINAL JEOPARDY category was Computer Science. Here is the question. I mean the answer.

John Tukey coined this compound word in 1959 saying it was as important as "Tubes, transistors, wires, tapes ..."

Person A wrote WHAT IS A MOTHERBOARD. Wrong. Person B wrote down WHAT IS. Wrong. (This might have worked if the question was in philosophy.) Peron C wrote down WHAT IS WI-FI. Wrong. I got it right from reasoning not memory. I do not have the quotes of John Tukey memorized. Does Watson? I doubt it. I think he would have gotten it wrong. (The answer can be found HERE.)

QUESTION TWO: The FINAL JEOPARDY category was 1930's Films. Here is the... answer

In this classic film, one of the characters tries to quote the Pythagorean theorem, but gets it wrong.

Two of the contestants wrote Gone with the Wind. The third one wrote the correct answer which I will not reveal here in case you want to try it. (The contestant who got it right won the game.) I doubt Watson would know it--- too much to correlate. (The answer can be found HERE.)

QUESTION THREE: This was not on Jeopardy. I am asking it in the form of a question: What is unusual about the Jeopardy Slogan? (The answer can be found HERE.)

Six degrees of separation has been proven. Really?

There is a paper (see here for an article about the paper, the link to the paper itself is later) that claims to PROVE that, on average, the distance (for some definition of distance) between any two people is 6.

1) We've blogged about this kind of thing:

My Pope Number is 2

What is your Erdos Number?

The six degrees of VDW

2) The paper's link is here and in case link rot sets in, my copy of it is here.

3) The paper has 14 authors. AH- so that's why we are, on the average, 6 degrees apart- because papers have so many authors. (Actually papers in Biology  have LOTS more than 14.)

4) The paper defines a mathematical model for social networks and analyzes a persons cost and benefit of forming a connection. 

5) Is the mathematical model realistic? I think so. But its always tricky since empirical evidence already gave the answer of six. The true test of a mathematical model is to predict something we didn't already know. 

6) One thing about applying this to the real world: What is a connection? Friendship? (also hard to define), handshakes? I like the will respond to my emails metric, though that may leave out half of my colleagues and even some of my friends.

(How come people do not respond to important emails? Perhaps a topic for a later blog.) 

7) My Jeopardy number is 1 in two different ways:

a)  My co-author Erik Demaine was mentioned in a question on Jeopardy, see here and look at the 800 dollar question in Double Jeopardy, Category Boy Genius.

b) My cousin Adam Winkler's book, Gunfight,  was mentioned in a question Jeopardy, see here. It was a 400 dollar question.

In both cases the question was easy, hence my inside information did not give me an advantage. 

(Note: they were actually mentioned in an answer on Jeop since Jeop has that weird format where they give the answer and you need to find the question. For example:

Game show that has a format that Bill Gasarch thinks is stupid

What is Jeopardy?

Goodhart's law: Ken Jennings and Types of Knowledge

Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a measure.  

I was watching the show Masterminds where Ken Jennings is one of the Masterminds. Here is what happened: 

Brook Burns (the host): The only vice president in the 20th century with initials H.H. was Hubert Humphrey. Who was the only vice president in the 19th century with initials H.H?

Bill Gasarch shouting at the screen: Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's VP for his first term! This is really obscure so this may be a rare case where I get a question right that Ken Jennings does not know!

Ken Jennings: Hannibal Hamlin. 

Bill Gasarch: Darn! However, I suspect he studied lists of presidents and vice presidents for the purpose of doing well on Jeopardy and now other shows. My knowledge is more natural in that I read books on presidents and vice presidents (best book, maybe the only book,  on Vice Presidents: Bland Ambition).  My knowledge of it is different from his. I tend to think my knowledge is more legitimate, though it would be hard to make that statement rigorous. If on quiz shows they asked follow-up questions, that might help alleviate this problem, if it is indeed a problem.

Misc: 

Ken Jennings is a Mormon so he does not drink or know about drinks. However, before going on Jeopardy he studied drinks for the show.

Ken Jennings does know novelty songs and that is legit since novelty songs comes up rarely on Jeopardy so I doubt he studied them in his preparation for going on Jeopardy. 

a) He knew that Shel Silverstein wrote A boy named Sue which was sung by Johnny Cash

b) He knew that Johnny Cash did a cover of Shel Silverstein's I'm being swallowed by a boa constrictor.

c) During his streak there was a category on novelty songs. He got 4 out of the 5 correct, and the one he got wrong I could tell he really knew. I got them all right, and faster, but Ken Jennings gets my respect for his legit knowledge of novelty songs. See here for the questions and answers. 

Goodharts law (maybe): Jeopardy is supposed to be about what people know. Is it supposed to be about what people study? Does studying for it help you  for things other than quiz shows?

When I watch a quiz show and get a question right there are levels of legitimacy:

1) I know the area naturally. 

2) I saw the question and answer on a different show and and I then looked it up and know more about it. So this is now legit.

3) I saw the question and answer on a different show and just know it as stimulus-response with very little understanding. Example: Kelly Clarkson was the first winner on American Idol, but I have never seen the show and only vaguely know how it works.

4) I saw the question and answer on the show I am watching, the exact episode, and I am watching a repeat. Sometimes I know stuff I don't normally know and then say OH, I've seen this episode before. 

Back to my point:

Is Ken Jennings memorizing lists a less-legit form of knowledge? If so, how to make that statement rigorous?

Is this what AI does? See also Chinese Room since that's also about a device that gets the right answers but perhaps for the ''wrong'' reason. 

Thoughts on the recent Jeopardy streak (SPOILERS)

James Holzhauer  has won 22 consecutive games of Jeopardy and has made around 1.6 million dollars. Nice work if you can get it. Here are some thoughts no this

1) Before James H the records for number of consecutive games was, and still is, Ken Jennings winning 74 in a row, and second place was 20. I was surprised that Ken was that much better than the competition.

2) Before James H the record for amount of money in normal play (not extra from, say, tournament of champions or losing to a computer) was around 400,000. I was surprised that Ken was that much better than the competition.

3) James is obliterating the records for most wins in a single game. He holds the top 12 records for this.  This is due to his betting A LOT on the daily doubles and the final jeop, as well as of course answering so many questions right.

4) One reason players in Jeopardy don't have long streaks is fatigue. The actually play
5 games a day, two days of the week.  James H is getting a break since he has two weeks off now since they will soon have the Teachers Tournament. This could work either way--- he gets a break or he loses being in-the-zone.

5) James strategy is:

a) Begin with the harder (and more lucrative) questions.

b) Bet A LOT on the daily doubles (which are more likely to be in the more lucrative questions) and almost always go into final jeop with more than twice your opponent (He failed to do this only once.)

c) Bet A LOT on Final Jeop- though not enough so that if you lose you lose the game. I think he's gotten every Final Jeop question right.

For more on his strategy see this article by Oliver Roeder in Nate Silvers Blog: here

6) I tend to think of this as being a high-risk, high-reward strategy and thus it is unlikely he will beat Ken Jennings, but every time he wins that thought seems sillier and sillier. While we are here, how likely is it that someone will beat Ken Jennings? In an article before all of this Ben Morrison in Nate Silvers Blog wrote that it was quite likely SOMEONE would break Ken J's record,  see here.

7) OKAY, how does James H compare to Ken J? According to Oliver Roeder in Nate Silvers Blog,
here, they are similar in terms of percent of questions answered right, but James H bets so much more (bets better?) which is why he is getting so much money. I'll be curious to see a head-to-head contest at some point. But to the issue at hand, they don't give James H that good a chance to break Ken J's record.

8) Jeop used to have a  5-game limit. Maybe that was a good idea- its not that interesting seeing the same person with the same strategy win 22 in a row. Also, the short-talk-with-Alex T-- James is running out of interesting things to say. I wonder what Alex did with Ken J after 50 games.
``So Ken, I hear you're good at Jeopardy''

9) Misc: Ken J was the inspiration for IBM to do Watson.

10) Will future players use James Strategy? Note that you have to be REALLY GOOD in the first place for it to help you. Maybe a modified version where you go for the lucrative questions and bet a lot on Daily Doubles (more than people have done in the past) when its an area you know really well (I'll take Ramsey Theory for $2000.)

11) I used to DVR and watch Jeop but didn't mind if I was a few behind. Now I have to stay on top of it so articles like those pointed to above don't give me a spoiler.

12) My prediction: He will beat Ken Jenning for money but not for number-of-games. I have no real confidence in these predictions.

The New Jeopardy Champion is a `A CS grad student from a school in New Haven'

 As of Sept 17, Matt Amodio has won 23 straight games in a row on Jeopardy and won over $800,000 in regular play. The following website is not quite up to date, but its close: here. Of course, that website will change. 

1) They refer to him as A CS grad student from a school in New Haven. My first thought was probably Yale, but whatever it is, they should just say it. I looked it up and it is Yale. So why aren't they just saying A CS grad student from Yale?  If someone works for an airline company they do not tell you which airline- prob to avoid giving that airline free publicity. But I would think a school is different. And I remember (perhaps incorrectly) that they DO say what school someone teaches at or is a student at. 

(ADDED LATER: a colleague of mine who was on Jeop (he lost his only game) tells me that YES, you re NOT ALLOWED to say the company you work for. He was from Riverdale Park, MD which might make some people think there is a Univ of MD at Riverdale Park . He also told me that when he was on the show the following happened:  On One of the shows of the game before I  played, Alex was curious which LA area restaurant somebody worked at (to see if he had eaten there--- he hadn't), and sure enough, they edited the name of the restaurant out.)

2) Longest streak: Ken Jennings: 74. Also most money in reg play: roughly 2.5 Mill

    2nd longest: James Holzhauer: 32. Also  2nd most money in reg play: roughly 2.4 Mill

    3rd longest: Matt Amodio: 23. Also  3rd most money in reg play: roughly 0.8 Mill

3) I do not think Matt will move into second place on any of these categories. He bets big on the daily doubles and it has paid off but either (a) he will miss and it will lead to a loss, or (b) he will just not get the daily double and be against a very good opponent. Item (b) happened to James H- and the person who beat him did have a good enough win streak to be in the Tournament of Champions. I wonder if they try to stop a long streak by picking really good opponents. I also wonder if they can even tell who will be a really good opponent. 

4) Matt has played in front of (or will- counting tomorrow) six hosts: Robin Roberts, LeVar Burton, David Faber, Joe Buck, Mike Richards, and Mayim Bialik. Six is a record which I suspect won't be broken, except possibly by Matt himself if he also plays in front of Ken Jennings (the rest of 2021 will be Mayim B and Ken J as hosts, see here.

5) Matt works in AI. When he gets his PhD and is on the job market will his Jeopardy success help him, hurt him, or neither?  

6) James H and Matt A are both very good at calculating how much to bet. I think Ken J is not quite as good but still good. Generally the players on Jeop are not that good at that aspect. I had the chance to ask some a champions (not any of those three) why that was and she said that most people get into because of the trivia-aspect, not the betting aspect. I wonder if just as players now study lots of facts to prep, they will also learn how to bet better. 

7) Ken J as host is a bit odd in that, if he says (as Alex T did sometimes) That category looks hard I won't believe him. I also have this suspicion that when a contestant gets something wrong Ken might be thinking what a moron; however, (a) by all accounts Ken is a nice guy, and (b)  I might be projecting. 

Explain this Scenario on Jeopardy

Ponder the following:

Larry, Moe, and Curly are on Jeopardy.

Going into Final Jeopardy:

Larry has $50,000, Moe has $10,000, Curly has $10,000

Larry bets $29,999, Moe bets $10,000, Curly bets $10,000

These bets are ALL RATIONAL and ALL MATTER independent of what the category is. For example, these bets make sense whether the category is THE THREE STOOGES or CIRCUIT LOWER BOUNDS.

Explain why this is.

I'll answer in my next post or in the comments of this one
depending on... not sure what it depends on.

If I tweeted here is what I would tweet

If I tweeted there is what I would tweet:

1. There was an interesting blog post that responded to Aaron Sterling's Chemoinformatics Post. See here for this interesting discussion.
2. See here for info on the Watson's performance on Jeopardy.
3. Why did Watson bet $937 on the Final Jeopardy question yesterday? (Tuesday) Zero would make sense. The max amount to guarantee victory even if he got it wrong would make sense. A nice round number to look more human would make sense.
4. The winner gets $1,000,000, second place gets $300,000, third gets $200,000. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutler have said they will give half of their winnings to charity. Watson said he would give all of his to charity. QUESTION: If you were on the show would you give 1/2 to charity? For Jennings and Rutler it isn't really hard to do since they already have lots of money from their prior Jeopardy appearances (though it is still admirable). But how about YOU?
5. Officially the authors of the CCC papers will be notified on Friday Feb 18. I have been told that this is an approx both ways. Could be earlier, could be later.
6. Some CCC notifications (all?) have been emailed. The list is not posted! At one time the quaint notion was that people should not find out if there paper got in or not by seeing someones telegraph message, website, or blog. Is this quaint-but-idiotic notion still in effect?
7. I got a copy of the complete Knuth Vol 4 in the mail today. How long have we been waiting for this? Knuth held a contest to name what we now call NP-completeness for use in this book.
8. Publishers have lists of people they send books to. As an editor for SIGACT NEWS I am on some of those lists. Today I got two copies of the exact same book. Both mailed to William Gasarch, SIGACT NEWS book review editor, Dept of CS, College Park MD, 20742. What was the book: Bijective Combinatorics.
9. CafePress.com emailed me a subject heading of gift of infinite choices. Alas, the actual letter said you can choose from 250 million styles and designs..
10. 12 days of Christmath (That is NOT misspelled.)
11. Also this one (I give two pointers in case one goes away.)

A problematic category on Jeopardy Raises a Good Question

I was watching a Jeopardy from 2004 (The Game Show Channel is rerunning Ken Jennings streak) and the following question raises a good question.

The contestants where Ken, Jerry, Jennifer.

In Double Jeopardy there was a category  Biblical Name The Same.

The clue was three last names (e.g., Driver, Sandler, West) and the correct response is a biblical name that is the first name of people with that last name (Adam: Adam Driver, Adam Sandler, Adam West).

What happened with Biblical Name The Same for 1200 shows an issue with the question.

Clue: Stewart, Graham, Grimes.

Jerry said  James. This was ruled incorrect.

Ken said Martha. This is correct.

Why is Martha Correct:

Martha Stewart is a well known TV personality focusing on home and hospitality.

Martha Graham was an American modern dancer, teacher, and choreographer (she died in 1991).

Martha Grimes is an American writer of detective fiction.

Frankly, the only one I had heard of was Martha Stewart.

But later they decided Jerry was right and gave him the points (Ken kept his points).  Here was Jerry's argument:

James Stewart was a well known  actor (died in 1997).

James Graham- the show said he was a British General in the 17th Century. I (Bill, not Jerry) looked up James Graham on Wikipedia- there are a lot of them. Four were under the category Military.  Of those, two were British. Neither was a General. One lived 1649-1730 so it may be him.

James Grimes-the show said he was a Senator involved with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.  I (Bill) looked it up- Grimes was a Republican and it was his party that was trying to impeach, but he (and six other Republicans) broke rank and voted for acquittal. He and the others were bothered that the process had been manipulated. There were rumors they were bribed with patronage jobs or cash though I could not tell if this was true.

The category is problematic.

It is implicit that the three people have to be famous.

This raises two questions and a challenge

Two Questions: What is fame?  How do you measure it? 

Challenges: Let x,y \(\ge\) 2. 

 Find x  last names L1,...Lx  such that there are y first names F1,...,Fy

with F1-L1, F1-L2,...,F1-Lx famous AND

        F2-L1, F2-L2,..., F2-Lx famous AND

DOT DOT DOT

        Fy-L1, Fy-L2,...,Fy-Lx famous.

For the example above x=3 and y=2. You either try the easier case x=2, y=2, or a harder case like x=3, y=3. 

Do you KNOW how you KNOW what you KNOW? I don't KNOW.

When watching Jeopardy with Darling if I get a question correct that is NOT in my usual store of knowledge (that is NOT Ramsey Theory, NOT Vice Presidents, NOT Satires of Bob Dylan) Darling asks me How did you know that? I usually reply I do not know how I knew that. Recently I DID know and I'll get to that later, but for now the question arises: Do you know how you know what you know?

1. As an undergrad I learned mostly from taking courses. Hence I could say things like I Know Group theory from a course I had in Abstract Algebra in the Fall of 1978 (Side Note- I know why I should care about groups from reading the algorithm for graph isom for graphs of bounded degree---in 1988). I learned a few things on my own- I learned that a graph is Eulerian iff every vertex has even degree from a Martin Gardner article. But since most of my knowledge was from courses I knew how I knew what I knew.
   
2. As a grad students I still took courses but more routes to knowledge emerged. Papers! I could say things like
   I know the oracle constructions about P vs NP because I read the Baker Gill Solovay paper on October 23, 1981. It helps that Oct 23 is Weird Al's birthday. But even here things get a bit murky- someone TOLD ME about the paper which lead me to read it, but I don't recall who. So one more route to knowledge emerged- people telling you stuff in the hallways.
   
3. I saw Anil Nerode give a talk on Recursive Mathematics and that day went to the library (ask your grandmother what a library is) and read some articles on it. This was well timed- I knew enough recursion theory and combinatorics to read up on recursive combinatorics. In this case I know exactly how I know what I know. Might be the last time.
   
4. As a professor I read papers, hear talks, hear things in hallways, and learn stuff. Its getting harder to know how I know things, but to some extend I still could. Until...
   
5. THE WEB. The Web is the main reason I don't know how I know things. I sometimes tell Darling I read it on the web which is (a) prob true, and (b) prob not very insightful.
   

So- do you know how you know what you know?

On Jeopardy recently the final Jeopardy question was as follows.

TOPIC: Island Countries.

ANSWER: No longer Western, this one-word nation has moved to the west side of the international Date Line to join Asia and Australia.

BILL: What is SAMOA!?

Darling wondered how I know that:

DARLING: How did you know that? Is there a Ramsey Theorist in Samoa?

BILL: Not that I know if, but that's a good guess as to how I knew that. Actually Lance had a blog post Those Happy Samoans about Samoa going over the international dateline and losing the advantage of having more time to work on their conference submissions.

DARLING: Too bad there isn't a Ramsey Theorist there to take advantage of that!

Thanks Lance!- In this one case I know how I know what I know!

Can you measure which pangrams are natural

A Pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet

The classic is:

                                      The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

(NOTE- I had `jumped' but a reader pointed out that there was no s, and that `jumps' is the correct word)

which is only 31 letters.

I could give a pointer to lists of such, but you can do that yourself.

My concern is:

a) are there any pangrams that have actually been uttered NOT in the context of `here is a pangram'

b) are there any that really could.

That is- which pangrams are natural?  I know this is an ill defined question.

Here are some candidates for natural pangrams

1) Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

2) Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes

3) Watch Jeopardy! Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game

4) Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz
(Okay, maybe that one is not natural as it uses archaic words. It means
``Carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an
eccentric person'  Could come up in real life. NOT. It uses every letter
exactly once.)

How can you measure how natural they are?

For the Jeopardy one I've shown it to people and asked them

``What is unusual about this new slogan for the show Jeopardy?''

and nobody gets it. more important- they believe it is the new slogan.

So I leave to the reader:

I) Are the other NATURAL pangrams?

II) How would you test naturalness of such?

Pinning down `natural' is hard. I did a guest post in 2004 before I was an official co-blogger, about when a problem (a set for us) is natural, for example the set all regular expressions with squaring (see here).

A Computer Scientist in Jeopardy

The long-running Jeopardy television game show had a first on Friday, when all three players ended up tied for the first time.

The three contestants on the venerable game show all finished with $16,000 after each answering the final question correctly in the category, "Women of the 1930s," on Friday's show. They identified Bonnie Parker, of the famed Bonnie and Clyde crime duo, as a woman who, as a waitress, once served one of the men who shot her…The show contacted a mathematician who calculated the odds of such a three-way tie happening — one in 25 million.

In that final round contestants choose how much of their winnings to risk, so it is impossible to give a probability in such a setting. It's more an issue of simple game theory.

Before the Final Jeopardy round the totals were $13,400, $8000 and $8000. Both of the $8000 decided to risk all of their money so they wouldn't be overtaken by the other one.

The $13,400 belonged to Scott Weiss, a computer science professor at Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland. Since $13,400 is between 1.5 and 2 times $8000, the standard strategy is to bet enough so that if you win you have more than $16,000 and if you lose you have more than $8000, for example betting $3000. Had Scott done so, he would have taken home all his winnings and come back for the next show.

Instead Scott bet $2600, leading to the $16,000 tie. By doing this, Scott gets to take home all his winnings and comes back for the next show.

It takes a computer scientist to make the most conservative bet, knowing that the rules of the game give no particular advantage to winning over tying and leading to the first three-way tie ever.

What I Tweeted

Various thoughts not restricted to 140 characters.

Congrats to Mihalis Yannakakis for his election into the National Academy of Engineering as well as new Sloan Fellows Julia Chuzhoy, Rafael Pass, Chris Peikert, Mark Braverman and Anup Rao. TTI-Chicago gets no respect with TTI-C Prof Chuzhoy listed at University of Chicago but it should be fixed soon.

I called the Watson-Jeopardy match in 2009. The IBM segments during the show were great selling points for computer science. John Markoff wrote a nice wrap-up article for the Times but note the correction

An article last Thursday about the I.B.M. computer Watson misidentified the academic field vindicated by Watson’s besting of two human opponents on “Jeopardy!” It is artificial intelligence — not computer science, a broader field that includes artificial intelligence.

I skipped the various university viewing parties in favor of watching the shows with my daughter Molly. During current events in history class she went on a rant why everyone should think the Watson victory was "so cool". That's my girl.

Wolfram Alpha knows Computational Complexity. Pretty impressive but doesn't know everything. Jeff tweeted

When I ask "Is multiplication in AC0?" it tells me about the Ace of Clubs. Fail.

So we need Watson and Wolfram Alpha combined to make sense of our field.

Next week I'm off to Porto, home of Complexity 2012, for some Port Wine, a Francesinha and the thesis defense of co-author André Souto.

Next in the sequence

When I posted on sequence problems here some people said that they did not have unique answers. Many problems FORMALLY do not have a unique answer, but common sense and simplicity lead to a unique answer. This recently happened on Jeopardy. The topic was Next In The Series. I'll give the questions here and pointers to the answers (actually the answers here and pointers to the questions since Jeopardy is an answer-and-question game.) Do you think some of these have non-unique solutions? If so, what are the other solutions? Are those problems unfair? As always I ask nonrhetorically. (my spell checker wanted me to put a space between non and rhetorically. I disagree.)

1. FA, SOL, ... NEXT
2. In the US Army: First Lt, Captain, ... NEXT
3. XXXVIII, XXXIX,... NEXT
4. FEDERAL HOLIDAYS: Memorial Day, Independence Day, ... NEXT
5. Orange, Yellow, (Wavelength around 510 nanometers)... NEXT

The combinatorics of Game Shows

 (Inspired by Pat Sajak stepping down from Wheel of Fortune)

How many different game show are there? Many. How many could there be?

1) Based on Knowledge or something else. Jeopardy is knowledge. Wheel and Deal-No Deal are something else. The oddest are Family Feud and America Says where you have to guess what people said which might not be whats true. Reminds me of the SNL sketch about a fictional game show Common Knowledge. Oddly enough there now is a REAL game show of that name, but it actually wants true answers to questions. 

2) Do the losers get anything more than some min? On Wheel they do, but I do not know of any other show where they do. On People Puzzler they get a subscription to People Magazine!

3) Is how much the winners win based on how well they do in the game, or is it a flat number. Jeop and Wheel is based on how they do in the game. America Says, Switch, and many others the winner does something else do either win (say) $10,000 or just $1,000.

4) MONEY: I want to say can you win A LOT or NOT SO MUCH. I'll set $20,000 above or below. ON Jeop or Wheel you CAN get > $20.000. As noted in the above item there are shows where at the end you can win $10,000 but that's it.

5) Do winners get to come back the next day? Jeop and Masterminds does that but I do not know of any other show that does. 

6) Are celebrities involved? This used to be more common, but seems to have faded. Hollywood Squares was an example. Masterminds is hard to classify in this regard since the celebs are people who know a lot of stuff (they are called Masterminds) and their main claim to fame might be being on Mastermind.  Or on some other quiz show. Ken Jennings was a Mastermind in the first season. 

7) If its question-based then is it multiple choice or fill in the blank? Some do both. Common Knowledge has the first round multiple choice, and later rounds fill-in-the-blank, and the finale is multiple-choice. 

8) Do you win money or merchandise? There are many combinations of the two. 

9) Are the players teams-of-3? (Common Knowledge), Individuals (Jeopardy), just one person or team (Deal-No Deal and Cash Cab), or something else. 

10) Is it a competition so people vs people (most of the quiz shows) or is it one person answering questions (Who wants to be a Millionaire, Cash Cab). I've noticed that on Cash Cab if you are close to the answer they give it to you, which I don't think hey would do on Jeop. This could be because there is no competitor, so being flexible is not unfair to someone else. Millionaire can't do this since its strictly multiple choice. 

There are other parameters but I will stop here. I leave it to the reader to more fully expand these categories and find out how many game shows there can be.

When Words Get Stretched Beyond Their Original meaning

STORY ONE:

 On a Jeopardy rerun with Alex Trebek the question (actually the answer, given the shows format) was (I paraphrase)

Who resigned his commision in the US Army Air Force in April 1941 after President Roosevelt publicly rebuked him for his views?

The answer (actually the question--Why does Jeopardy do this answer-question thing, drives me nuts!) was

Charles Lindbergh.

Alex Trebek then said  Charles Lindberg's views on WW II were not politically correct.

This really struck me since Politically correct means, to quote Wikipedia:

a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense of disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. 

Wikipedia also adds that the term is generally used pejoratively with an implication that these policies are excessive or unwarranted. 

 But Alex Trebek is using the term to mean  incorrect or perhaps incorrect given what we know now or if you think history is written by the winners, then perhaps incorrect since Germany lost the war.  But my point is that I really don't think the term  politically incorrect  makes sense here.

STORY TWO

More recently I heard an anti-masker say

We should not let some woke school board take the right to not wear a mask away from parents and children.

Independent of if you are anti-mask-mandates or pro-mask-mandates, this seems like a strange use of the word  woke  which means, to paraphrase Wikipedia:

Having an awareness of racial prejudice, gender prejudice, sexual orientation prejudice, and the past and current discrimination they have and do cause. 

I've seen it both positively and negatively.

The anti-masker's using of the term seems odd in that mask wearing is not a woke issue. Perhaps he should have said 

We should not let some Nazi school board take the right to not wear a mask away from parents and children.

The term  Nazi while not actually correct, conveys that the school board is authoritarian. However, he really could not use the term that since he was was a neo-Nazi and proud of it. That raises a question: what pejorative  term can a Neo-Nazi use when they want to say someone is  Authoritarian? I ask non-rhetoically. 

But I am getting off topic here- my real point is that the word woke is being used to mean Authoritarian which is not even close to its original meaning. 

MY POINT

The above are examples of how a word in English may change its definition over time, which is not really news, but I found the examples interesting since I saw the origin of these words.

BILL, THIS IS A COMPLEXITY BLOG! SO TALK ABOUT COMPLEXITY. OR MATH!

In math do words change their meaning over time? Yes. Here are a few

Function: at one time `function' implicitly means a function that occurs in nature. So only continous and perhaps diff functions qualified. 

Sets: probably similar.

Efficient: At one time this was an informal notion (Joe Kruskal's paper on MST (see here) is an example of that), then it seemed to be P or perhaps BPP. For some its linear or O(n log n) with a small constant. Rather than say the notion changed, its more like it was never that well defined in the first place, and still isn't. 

Constructive: The many diff definitions of this word could be a blog post of its own. In fact, I thought it was, but I could not find it. I did find lots of blog posts that use the word constructive in diff ways. 

Elementary: Also has many definitions, though they are closer together than for Constructive. This one I did do a post on here

Can you name a famous living Chemist? Can anyone?

I was re-watching the  Greatest-of-all-time Jeopardy championship and the following happen (I paraphrase)

----------------------
Alex Trebek: The category is Chemistry and we have a special guest reading the clues.

Darling: I wonder who that will be.

Bill: Hmm. I assume some famous chemist.
------------------------

So who was it? Bryan Cranston, the actor who PLAYED chemist Walter White on Breaking Bad.

Why couldn't they get a famous living chemist to read the clues?

My guess: there are no famous living chemists.

The number of famous living scientists is fairly short and they are often known for things that are not quite their science. Some are famous because the popularize science (deGrasse Tyson, Dawkins) or because of something unusual about their life (Hawkings when he was alive) or for something else entirely that they did (Ted Kaczynski).  Are any famous for the actual work that they do in the science?

Andrew Wiles was famous for a brief time, and even made People Magazine's 25 most intriguing people of the year list in the early 1990's (after he solved Fermat's Last Theorem). So he was famous but it was short lived.

Terry Tao was on the Colbert Report (see here) after he won the Fields Medal, the MacAuthor Genius award, and the Breakthrough prize. And even that fame was short lived.

I looked at the web page of Nobel Prize winners, here.

The only Chemistry Nobel's I recognized were Marie Curie,  Irene Joilet-Curie (Marie's Daughter), and Erst Rutherford.

The only Physics Nobel's I recognized were

Richard Feynman,

 Eugene Wigner (for writing about The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences),

Richard Hofstadter (since he was the father of Douglas H and an uncle of Leonard H)

 Andrew Geim (since he won  both an Ig-Noble prize and a Nobel prize, see  here)

Wolfgang Pauli (I've heard the term `Pauli Principle" though I did not know what it was until I looked it up while preparing this blog. I prob still don't really know what it means.)

Enrico Fermi

Erwin Schrodinger

Paul Dirac

Robert Millikan

Albert Einstein

Max Karl Ernest Ludwig Planck (I thought his last name was `Institute')

Johannes Diderik van der Waals

Pierre Curie

Marie Curie


So, some questions:

a) Am I wrong? Are there famous living chemists I never heard of? Are there any famous living scientists who are famous for their work in science?

b) If I am right then was there ever a time when there were famous scientists?

c) If there was such a time, what changed?

(I ask all of this non-rhetorically and with no agenda to push.)