Read Online Final Jeopardy by Stephen Baker - Free Book Online Page A

game, Trivial Pursuit, was a national rage, and the mood seemed right for a
Jeopardy
revival. The new game was much the same—the three-contestant format, the (painfully) contrived little chats with the host following the first commercial break, and the jingle during Final Jeopardy. It took time for the new show to catch on. In its first year, it was relegated to the wee hours in many markets, including New York. But within a few years, it settled into early evening time slots. It was eventually syndicated on 210 stations and became a ritual for millions of fact-loving viewers.
    Still, when Friedman arrived at
Jeopardy
in 1997, he saw a problem. Too many of the questions still focused on academic subjects. They were the same types of history, geography, and literature clues that had captivated America four decades earlier, when Charles Van Doren paraded his faux smarts. But times had changed, and so had America’s intellectual appetite. Sure, some of the most dedicated viewers still subscribed to the show’s mission, to inform and educate. They wanted reminders on the river that separated cisalpine Gaul from Italy in Roman times (“What is the Rubicon?”), the last British colony on the American mainland to gain independence (“What is Belize?”), and the 1851 novel that contained “a dissertation on cetology” (“What is
Moby Dick
?”).
    These were the
Jeopardy
purists. They tended to be older, raised in Van Doren’s heyday. But their ranks were shrinking as other types of information were exploding on the brand-new World Wide Web. As Friedman put it: “Anything that veered off the academic foundation was deemed to be pop culture. And to purists, that was heresy.” But he feared that
Jeopardy
would lose relevance if it relied on academic clues in an age of much broader information.
    So he leavened the mix, bringing in more of the topics that consumed people on coffee breaks, from sports to soap opera. If you remembered the person who conspired in 1994 to “whack Nancy Kerrigan’s knee” (“Who is Tonya Harding?”), you probably didn’t learn about her while reading
Bartlett’s Quotations
or brushing up on the battle of Gettysburg. Sometimes Friedman blended the popular and the scholarly. During the 1999 season, one category was called Readings from Homer. It featured clues about the other Homer, author of the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
, read by Dan Castelleta, the voice of the lovable dunce of TV’s
The Simpsons
. The clues were written in the dumbed-down style of the modern Homer: “Hero speaking here: ‘Nine days I drifted on the teeming sea . . . upon the tenth we came to the coastline of the lotus eaters. . . . Mmmm, lotus!’” (“Who is Odysseus?”)
    From the perspective of a
Jeopardy
computer, it’s worth noting that Friedman’s adjustments to the
Jeopardy
canon made the game harder. Instead of mastering a set of formal knowledge, the computer would have to troll the ever-expanding universe of what modern folk carried around in their heads. This shifted the focus from what people
should
know to what they
did
know—collectively speaking—from a few shelves of reference books to the entire Internet. What’s more, for a computer, the formal stuff—the factoids—tended to be far easier. Facts often appear in lists, many of them accompanied by dates. One mention of the year 1215, and any self-respecting
Jeopardy
computer could sniff out the relevant document (“What is the Magna Carta?”). But imagine a computer responding to this clue: “Here are the rules: if the soda container stops rotating & faces you, it’s time to pucker up” (“What is Spin the Bottle?”).
    Yes, Harry Friedman turned
Jeopardy
into a tougher game for computers, and he also built it into a breeding ground for celebrity champions. Throughout its history,
Jeopardy
maintained a