My Jeopardy! Strategy Advice To IBM - Part 5

Ed Toutant Report on Watson Jeopardy! Visit – September 17, 2010

GAMESMANSHIP AND INCREMENTAL STRATEGIES

There are several subtle acceptable variations of game play in a typical Jeopardy! match that are commonly used, sometimes using technicalities and loopholes in the rules to gain a competitive advantage, and sometimes just trying to speed up the game.  These little things can sometimes make a difference in the outcome of a game.

Use the full time allowed to respond

This was what surprised me the most about how Watson played.  Watson usually responded immediately after he was prompted by the host, even though contestants are allowed up to five seconds to begin their answer.  I was surprised that those five extra seconds (okay, let’s say four seconds, just to be safe) were not being used to keep crunching data and improve  the accuracy of the responses.  This was especially noticeable on the Daily Double questions, since Watson did not intentionally buzz in already thinking that he knew the answer.  Alex Trebek allows far more time to answer a Daily Double.  It is common to have a contestant think for six or seven seconds before Alex gently prompts “I need an answer.”  Not using the full time available to respond seems like a lost opportunity.  Ken Jennings was famous for buzzing in, confident that the answer was somewhere in his head, and then taking a few seconds to extract it.

Related to the above, on Final Jeopardy! clues, you have 30 seconds to respond, so maybe that’s more time than Watson would ever need.  Still, I think Watson could get a great head start as soon as he sees the FJ category.  There is typically about five minutes of break time while contestants make their wagers and prepare for FJ.  During that time, it seems that Watson could be narrowing his focus to concentrate his search on the most relevant material.  For example, if the FJ category is Baseball, Watson could partition his database so he won’t need to search areas like African Explorers or Nobel Prizes (though you can never be sure about possible crossovers between subjects).  If that approach is effective, it should work nearly as well during the first and second rounds of Jeopardy!, with ample time to pre-sort some data on each subject before the clues are selected.  Maybe Watson already does that.  I don’t know.

Faster or slower game pace

I don’t know if Jeopardy! is committed to revealing all 60 clues on the board, or if they will leave some clues unused if time runs out.  If some clues are left unseen, that will help whoever is leading and hurt whoever is trailing.  There are many ways to slow the pace of the game, if that is desired.  Usually the best contestants play faster and complete the board, but one recent contestant on the show, Roger Craig, who broke Ken Jennings’ single day win record with $77,000, tended to pause and hesitate a lot.  I don’t know if he did that intentionally, but he left a lot of unused clues on the board, including 9 unused on the 09/17/10 episode. 

Board bounce when selecting clues

Some viewers find the practice annoying, but there is an increasing tendency for contestants to bounce around the board and not select clues sequentially from top to bottom.  Sometimes they are hunting for Daily Doubles, but a few contestants intentionally try to keep their opponents off balance by continuously changing categories.  The theory is that the person selecting has a little more time to think of the answer because he knows which category he will select, whereas the opponents will need a little more time to adjust.  It’s not clear how effective the bounce is against regular opponents, but it seems obvious that it would be more disconcerting against humans than against a computer, so it might be an effective strategy for Watson to use.

Shorten or paraphrase the category name when selecting clues

It is common for contestants to select the next clue by saying, “Same category for $1200, Alex” or, “Let’s finish the category, please.”  This can serve two purposes.  It might simply be an attempt to speed up the game, or it might be a conscious effort to avoid reminding the opponents of the specific category name.  Contestants often buzz in confidently with a response, only to find that it doesn’t fit the category name.  Some of the smartest (and most devious) players will intentionally leave out a key word when they select a clue, hoping their opponents will forget.  This sometimes works.  It seems a little sleazy, but it’s allowed, and sometimes even encouraged by the producers, to avoid wasting the several seconds needed to enunciate a complicated category name.  For example, a player might say “Stallone Movies” to select “Stallone Movie Sequels,” or say “Nursery Rhymes” to select “Nursery Rhyme Towns.”

Watson’s temporary initial buzzer advantage

The best Jeopardy! players do not wait for the lights to come on and then try to react and press their buzzers.  (I wish I had known that when I played in 1989.)  Good players try to anticipate the “go light,” by studying Alex Trebek’s speaking pace and trying to buzz in after the last syllable, when an unseen human activates the lights.  It typically takes several clues before players feel in sync with the light.  This is when Watson has his maximum buzzer advantage, because he is fast enough to react to the light signal and activate his buzzer, and does not need to anticipate the light (I assume).   Therefore, Watson should exploit his temporary increased buzzer advantage at the beginning of the game by selecting the clues with the highest value.  If Watson has a temporary advantage while the opponents are still working on their timing, there’s no sense in wasting it on $200 questions.

Don’t include a person’s first name in your response

This is very basic strategy, Jeopardy 101.  Never provide more information than what is required, because part of it might be wrong.  I was surprised to see that Watson usually (but not always) answered with both a first and a last name.  This seems pointlessly risky, since Watson might ruin an acceptable answer by adding an unneeded first name.  No one knows this better than Ken Jennings.  The only reason anyone knows who he is today is because he applied this rule in his very first game.  His FJ clue was: “THE 2000 OLYMPICS: She’s the first female track & field athlete to win medals in 5 different events at a single Olympics.”   Ken had a vague idea, but wasn’t sure of the first name, so he wrote: “Who is Jones?”  If Ken had guessed wrong about Marion Jones’s first name, none of us would have ever heard of him and this Jeopardy! Challenge probably wouldn’t be happening.

Try betting irregular dollar amounts

One of the most challenging parts of Jeopardy! for many players is the need to do quick math in their head under pressure, especially when making a bet.  It is always easier for humans to do math that involves only round numbers.  Unlike humans, Watson can’t get flustered and forget to carry the one during addition.  So Watson should exploit his inherent math superiority by never using a round number on a Daily Double wager.  For example, instead of betting $8,000, try betting $7,837.  This may give viewers the impression  that Watson’s thinking is very precise, but the real motivation is to make the math more difficult for his opponents when they have to make a wager.  Important Jeopardy! tournament games have been lost due to math errors.  That is how Brad Rutter beat Michael Rooney in the UTOC.  Michael told me he would have won that match if he had just done the FJ math right, and Brad displayed very weak math ability when he competed on Grand Slam.