Computer to "play" Jeopardy

IBM is moving from Deep Blue to Jeopardy Blue with an attempt to build a computer that can compete with humans at Jeopardy. I think they should make the computer take the qualifying tests and wait its turn. They claim that the computer will only use information that it has "read" or processed and not be hooked up to the internet. As mentioned in the article, I agree that the real difficulty is for the computer to "understand" the question rather than searching for the answer. We all know how quippy, and full of puns or clever wordplay that a Jeopardy question can be. Sometimes the clue can offer two directions to the answer and knowing the category is important. It seems that this problem is very much tied to parsing the language of the question more than anything else.

In a perhaps unintentional analogy with Chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov playing IBM's chess computer Deep Blue, it has been suggested that Ken Jennings, all-time greatest Jeopardy player, come back to play this new Jeopardy playing computer.

I would imagine that to train or perhaps test the computer program, called Watson, one could use the J! Archive to see if the computer can accurately answer questions from Jeopardy's past. The infographic makes it look as if the computer will just gather relevant data from the clue, plug it into improvised Google-like or a linked Wikipedia-like database (like six degrees of Wikipedia) and spit out the answer. Still, this is a much more interesting problem than a computer grinding through ply after ply of chess moves. It will be interesting to see if it works.

(via Slashdot)

Jeopardy question - rivers and world capitals

Last night's Jeopardy final question was:

"With 4, more national capitals are located on this river than any other river in the world"

The key to jeopardy is that the questions give more clues to the answer. the first thing the contestants seemed to think of was to pick a long river to answer. That appeared to lead them astray as two picked the Nile, which is incorrect. Rather, if it is four national capitols then it must be in a place in the world that has many nations close together, that they might share a river. That had me thinking of Europe and so I picked the Danube, which was the correct answer.

Since I think I am a big hotshot, and I like to test my intellectual limits , I tried to think of the capitols. I guessed Prague, Bucharest, and Vienna, but I could not think of a fourth. I suppose that is for the best since I only got one, Vienna, correct. The four are: Vienna (Austria), Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest (Hungary), Belgrade (Serbia). Prague is too far north, and so is Bucharest. That is why today I looked it up so I could learn something.

What capitols are on the Nile? Cairo (Egypt) and the Blue and the White Nile meet at Khartoum in Sudan, but Addis Ababa in Ethopia is not on the Nile. Thanks for playing, though.

Another interesting thought inspired by this question is the number of national capitals that have rivers flowing through them. Since most cities are situated in places which have natural transportation by water like rivers I am sure that most national capitals have a river associated with them. That might be a good Jeopardy category itself. Given the river, name the national capital.

Thames: London
Seine: Paris
Hudson: New York
Liffey: Dublin
Molonglo: Canberra

Returned Christmas gift that don't work. What is the Jeopardy DVD home game?

I am a big fan of the Jeopardy TV show. I fancy myself good at trivia, since I have proven over and over again that I don't know anything important. Thus when Alex Trebek recommended the Jeopardy DVD home game, I made sure that Santa knew that's just what I wanted.

Santa came through and left the game under the tree; I was so excited! This game comes with a box that is inserted between your own DVD player and the TV using RCA composite video inputs. This is the start of an issue since my DVD player has an HDMI hookup to my TV but it still has the old-fashioned hookups. It also comes with wireless buzzers, ahem, signaling devices, that had me chomping at the bit to get this thing going. The setup of the game requires you to program the controllers with the remote of your DVD player and then you use the signaling devices that came with the game to do the rest. The Jeopardy box comes with a wire to an IR emitter that must be positioned correctly near the IR receiver on your DVD player to work. Oh, and by the way your DVD player better support closed captions for the game to work. This is where the troubles began.

Tryout 1: I have an OPPO DV-981HD upconverting DVD player to get me 1080p input to my HD TV. Luckily it still has regular video input so I put the DVD machine between it and the TV and got to programming. Unfortunately I have just found out after many months that this DVD player doesn't have closed captioning. Just press "title" or "subtitle" you say? That didn't work either. Some searching revealed that many of the new digital DVD players don't have closed caption. I love my OPPO player, it works great for me and has a great picture on the TV. No great loss for me, but a big problem for the game. On to DVD player two.

Tryout 2: Glancing around at the TV console and components I noticed my neglected Xbox. That thing plays DVD's doesn't it? So I installed the Jeopardy box between the Xbox and the TV and got started. I should mention that I have many extra cables (even for the non-standard Xbox), so this wasn't a problem for me except for the endless threading of the cables in and out of the entertainment center. This time I made it a quarter of the way through the programming. The game refused to recognize the up arrow on the Xbox DVD controller. Skipping that step left me with a game that still wouldn't work. On to DVD player number three.

Tryout 3: Upstairs in the exercise room we have a Proscan DVD player that is so old that it wouldn't play the Desperate Housewives DVD's or my copy of Being John Malkovich. I had already given it up for lost so I knew that I needed a new DVD player for this room. We will return here in a minute.

Tryout 4: Did you know you can get an Insignia DVD player for $30? Now I do. I grabbed two of these (one for Jeopardy, one for exercising) and raced home to try it out. I opned only one and tried it with the Jeopardy system. No closed caption so no programming! I returned one since it wasn't playing well with the jeopardy game, but now we can watch DVD's while we are exercising. I was ready to give up on the Jeopardy game, but...

Tryout 3 redux: In my desperation I tried the Jeopardy DVD in the ancient Proscan DVD player. It worked! I unplugged that player and got it downstairs. Once again I installed the Jeopardy box between this DVD player and the TV. Then a miracle occurred, I made it through the programming of the remote. Left arrow, Up arrow, Right arrow, Enter, and we were good to go. Let's play a game. Well then it froze up on the way to the menus. I took out the DVD and carefully cleaned it with only strokes across the disc, not in circles around. I blew some compressed air into the player to get some of the dust of years out of it. We fired up the game again and got a game started! I was losing and I blamed it on the speed of buzzing in on the controllers but we checked and they worked, I was just slow.

Impressions of the game: The game is slow and the answers (questions) were only multiple choice. The game doesn't show all of the dollar values under the categories so you don't know whether you are finished a category or not. Don't believe the demonstration video on Amazon, game play is slow and tortuous except for the frantic pressing to buzz in. We made it through a round of Jeopardy and then the game froze up again on the first question of Double Jeopardy. We then packed that game up and returned it to Amazon. There is a help site by MGA, the maker of the game, that doesn't offer much more advice than how to position the IR emitter of the jeopardy box onto your DVD player properly. That wasn't our problem.

This game had so much promise. As we printed out the return slip "Santa" finally read the comments on the Amazon site. They are uniformly negative and seem to have been written in a drunken rage after hours of failure to set up the device. Most folks were unable to program the box and the rest found that the game froze up all the time. Even the youtube comments under one person's video of playing the game express the same frustrations. The game costs $60 to $75, and we know that DVD players can be as low as $30 why didn't the just make a game with DVD player built in that might actually have worked or been preprogrammed. (I am not the only who thought this.) Oh Alex, you have let me down on this one. I guess I will just have to take the test and get on the show if I want to play.

A new hope: If you would like some Jeopardy questions and trivia to keep you entertained in the absence of a good home Jeopardy game there is the Jeopardy archive maintained by fans of the show. You can also go to the official Jeopardy website. There is a new online search scheduled for late January. Are you in?