Final Jeopardy

by Stephen Baker

  Computers, of course, can rummage through mountains of data millions of times faster than humans. But humans compensate with mental shortcuts, many of them honed over millions of years of evolution. Instead of plowing through copious evidence, humans instinctively read signals and draw quick conclusions, whether they involve trusting a stranger or deciding where to pitch a tent. “Mortals cannot know the world, but must rely on uncertain inferences, on bets rather than demonstrable proof,” wrote the German psychologist Gert Gigerenzer. In recent decades, psychologists have unearthed dozens of these rules, known as heuristics. Many of them would guide humans in a Jeopardy match against a much faster computer.

  The most elementary heuristic is based on favoring the first answer to pop into the brain. That one automatically starts in the front of the line; it is more trusted simply by virtue of arriving early. Which ideas pop in first? Following another heuristic, they’re often the answers contestants are most familiar with. Given a choice between a well-known place or person or an obscure one, studies show that people opt for what they know. “If you ask people, ‘Which of these two cities has a larger population,’ they’ll almost always choose the more familiar one,” said Richard Carlson, a professor of cognitive psychology at Penn State. Usually this works. If a Jeopardy player has to name the most populous cities in a certain country, the most famous ones—London, Tokyo, Berlin, New York—often fit the bill. This approach can lead to bloopers, of course. But it happens less often in Jeopardy than in the outside world. Why? Again, the writers, being human, work from the same rules of thumb, and they’re eager to connect with contestants and with the nine million people watching on TV. They want the contestants to succeed and to look smart, and they want people at home to feel smart, too. That’s critical to Jeopardy’s popularity. “You can’t forget that it’s a TV show,” said Roger Craig, a six-time Jeopardy champion. “They’re writing for the person in the living room.” And that viewer, like Ken Jennings—and unlike a computer—races along well-worn mental paths to answer questions. These paths are marked with signs and signals that call out to the human brain and help it navigate.

  A century ago, the psychologist William James divided human thought into two types, associative and true reasoning. For James, associative thinking worked from historical patterns and rules in the mind. True reasoning, which was necessary for unprecedented problems, demanded deeper analysis. This came to be known as the “dual process” theory. Late in the twentieth century, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton redefined these cognitive processes as System 1 and System 2. The intuitive System 1 appeared to represent a primitive part of the mind, perhaps dating from before the cognitive leap undertaken by our tool-making Cro-Magnon ancestors forty thousand years ago. Its embedded rules, with their biases toward the familiar, steered people toward their most basic goals: survival and reproduction. System 2, which appeared to arrive later, involved conscious and deliberate analysis and was far slower. When it came to intelligence, all humans were more or less on an equal footing in the ancient and intuitive System 1. The rules were easy, and whether they made sense or not, everyone knew them. It was in the slower realm of reasoning, System 2, that intelligent people distinguished themselves from the crowd.

  Still, great Jeopardy players like Ken Jennings cannot afford to ignore the signals coming from the caveman quarters of their minds. They need speed, and the easy answers pouring in through System I are often correct. But they have to know when to distrust this reflexive thought, when to pursue a longer and more analytical route. In the same game in which Jennings tracked down Abelard and Heloise, this clue popped up in the Tricky Questions category: “Total number of each animal that Moses took on the ark with him during the great flood.” Jennings lost the buzz to Matt Kleinmaier, a medical student from Chicago, who answered, “What is two?” It was wrong. Jennings, aware that it was supposed to be tricky, noticed that it asked for “each animal” instead of “each species.” He buzzed for a second chance at the clue and answered, “What is one?” That was wrong, too. The correct answer, which no one came up with, was “What is zero?”

  Jennings and Kleinmaier had fallen for a trick. Each had focused on the gist of the clue—the number of animals boarding the biblical ark—while ignoring one detail: The ark builder was Noah, not Moses. This clue actually came from a decades-old psychological experiment, one that has given a name—the Moses Illusion—to the careless thinking that most humans employ.

  It’s easy enough to understand. The brain groups information into clusters. (Unlike computers, it doesn’t move packets of encoded data this way and that. The data stay put and link up through neural connections.) People tend to notice when one piece of information doesn’t jibe with its expected group. It’s an anomaly. But Noah and Moses cohabit numerous clusters. Thematically they are both in the Bible, visually, both wear beards. Phonetically, their names almost rhyme. A question about Ezekiel herding animals into the ark might not pass so smoothly. According to a study headed by Lynn Reder, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, the Moses Illusion illustrates a facet of human intelligence, one vital for Jeopardy.

  Most of what humans experience as perception is actually furnished by the memory. This is because the conscious brain can only process a trickle of data. Psychologists agree that only one to four “items,” either thoughts or sensations, can be held in mind, immediately available to consciousness, at the same time. Some have tried to quantify these constraints. According to the work of Manfred Zimmerman of Germany’s Heidelberg University, only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second. Many psychologists object to these attempts to measure thoughts and perceptions as digital bits. But however they’re measured, the stark limits of the mind are clear. It’s as if each person’s senses generated enough data to run a 3D Omnimax movie with Dolby sound—only to funnel it through an antediluvian modem, one better suited to Morse code. So how do humans re-create the Omnimax experience? They focus on the items that appear most relevant and round them out with stored memories, what psychologists call “schemas.”

  In the Moses example, people concentrate on the question about animals. The biblical details, which appear to fit into their expected clusters, are ignored. It’s only when a wrong name intrudes from outside the expected orbit that alarms go off. In one experiment at Carnegie Mellon, when researchers substituted a former U.S. president for Moses, people noticed right away. Nixon had nothing to do with the ark, they said.

  Even after falling victim to the Moses Illusion, Jennings found no fault in his own thinking. “The brain’s doing the right thing!” he said. “It’s focusing on the right part of the question: How many animals did the biblical figure take onto the ark?” That, he said, is how the brain should work. “It’s just that the question writer has found a way to work against you.” Those sorts of tricks, he added, are uncommon on Jeopardy.

  Strangely enough, the cerebral carelessness that leads to the Moses Illusion also serves a useful function for human thought. Filtering out details not only eliminates time-consuming busy work. It also allows people to overlook many variations and to generalize. This is important. If they focus too much on small changes, they might think, for example, that each time a friend gets a haircut or a suntan, she’s a different person. Instead, the brain settles on the gist of the person and is ready to look past some details—or, in many cases, to ignore them. This can be embarrassing. (Sometimes it is a different person.) Still, by skipping over details, the brain is carrying out a process that is central to human intelligence and one that confounds computers. It’s thinking more broadly and focusing on concepts.

  The Jeopardy studio sits on the sun-drenched Sony lot in Culver City. Seven miles south of Hollywood’s Sunset and Vine, this was a suburban hinterland when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) started making movies there in 1915. In later decades it turned out such classics as The Wizard of Oz and Ben Hur—a
ll of them introduced by the iconic roaring lion. Following years of mergers and acquisitions, the lot became the property of a Japanese industrial giant—a development that likely would have shocked Samuel Goldwyn. Sony later gobbled up Columbia Studios, which had belonged to Coca-Cola for a few years in the eighties. On the Sony lot, the MGM lion gave way to Lady Liberty holding her torch. In the summer of 2007, as IBM considered a Jeopardy project, tourists on the Sony lot were filing past the sets of Spiderman II and Will Smith’s Happyness. Others with free passes lined up for Jeopardy. If they made their way past the fake Main Street, with its cinema, souvenir shop, and café, they would come across a low-slung office building named for Robert Young, the actor who played the homespun 1970s doctor Marcus Welby, M.D.

  This is where Harry Friedman worked. Friedman, then in his late fifties, was the executive producer of both Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, the top-and second-ranked game shows in America. Wheel, as it was known, relied on the chance of a spinning wheel and required only the most rudimentary knowledge of common phrases and titles. Its host was a former TV weatherman named Pat Sajak, who had been accompanied since 1983 by the lovely Vanna White. She had showcased more than four thousand dresses through the years while turning the letters on the big board and leading the clapping while the roulette wheel spun. For some Jeopardy fans, even mentioning the two games in the same breath was an outrage. It would be like card players comparing the endlessly complex game of Bridge to Go Fish. Nevertheless, Wheel attracted some eleven million viewers every weeknight evening, and about nine million tuned in to Jeopardy. Harry Friedman’s job, while touching on the world of knowledge and facts, was to keep those millions of people watching his two hit shows. In a media world exploding with new choices, it was a challenge.

  In movie studios on this Sony-Columbia lot, men with the bookish mien of Harry Friedman are cast as professors, dentists, and accountants. His hair, which recedes toward the back of his head, is still dark, and matches the rims of his glasses. His love for television dates back to his childhood. His father ran one of the first TV dealerships in Omaha, and the family had the first set in the neighborhood, a 1950 Emerson with a rounded thirteen-inch screen. Friedman’s goal as a youngster was to write for TV. While he was in college, he pursued writing, working part-time as a sports and general assignment reporter for the Lincoln Star. After graduating, in 1971, he traveled to Hollywood. He eventually landed a part-time job at Hollywood Squares, a popular daytime game show, where he wrote for $5 a joke.

  Friedman climbed the ladder at Hollywood Squares, eventually producing the show. He also wrote stand-up acts for comedians and entertainers, people like Marty Allen and Johnny Carson’s old trumpet-playing bandleader, Doc Severinsen. He got his big break in 1994, when he was offered the top job at Wheel of Fortune. The show, a sensation in the 1980s, was stagnating. Friedman soon saw that antiquated technology had slowed the game to a crawl. The spectators, hosts, and audience had to sit and wait for ten or fifteen minutes between each round while workers installed the next phrase or jingle with big cardboard letters. Friedman ordered a shift to electronic letters. The game speeded up. Ratings improved.

  Two years later, he was offered the top job at Jeopardy. The game, which today radiates such wholesomeness, emerged from the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. “That’s where we came from. That’s our history,” Friedman said. Back then, millions tuned their new TV sets to programs that featured intellectual brilliance. Among the most popular was Twenty-One, where a brainy young college professor named Charles Van Doren appeared to be all but omniscient. The ratings soared as Van Doren summoned answers. Often they came instantly. Other times he appeared to dig into the dusky caverns of his memory, surfacing with the answer only after a torturous and suspenseful mental hunt. Van Doren seemed to epitomize brilliance. He was a phenomenon, a national star. This was the kind of brainpower the United States would be needing—in technology, diplomacy, and education—to prevail over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Knowledge was sexy. And when it turned out that the producers were feeding Van Doren the answers, a national scandal erupted. It led to congressional hearings, a condemnation by President Eisenhower—“a terrible thing to do to the American people”—and stricter regulations covering the industry. For a few years, quiz shows all but disappeared.

  In 1963, Merv Griffin, the talk show host and entrepreneur, was wondering how to resurrect the format. According to a corporate history book, he was in an airplane with his wife, Julann, when the two of them came up with an idea. If people suspect that you’re feeding contestants the answers, why not devise a show that provides the answers—and forces players to come up with the questions?

  It was the birth of Jeopardy. Griffin came up with simple, enduring rules, the sixty clues, including three hidden Daily Doubles and the tiny written exam for Final Jeopardy. To fill the thirty seconds while the players scribbled their final response on a card, Griffin wrote a catchy sixty-four-note jingle that became synonymous with the show. He hired Art Fleming, a strait-laced actor in TV commercials, as the game’s host. In March 1964, Jeopardy was launched as a daytime show. It continued through 1975 and reappeared briefly at the end of that decade.

  Griffin brought Jeopardy back in 1984 as a syndicated evening show hosted by a young, mustachioed Alex Trebek. A new board 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 strict limit of five matches for returning champs. This seemed unfair to Friedman, and he debated it with colleagues for years. The downside? “You get somebody on the show who is there forever,” he said. Imagine if the person was unlikable or, worse, boring. Nonetheless, he lifted the limit in 2003. And the following year—wouldn’t you know it?—a contestant stayed around for months and months. It seemed like forever. But this, it turned out, wasn’t a bad thing at all. Ratings soared. Jeopardy had hatched its first celebrity.

  His name was Ken Jennings. Nothing about the man suggested quiz show dominance. Unlike basketball, where a phenom like LeBron James emerged in high school, amid monster dunks, as the Next Big Thing, a Jeopardy champion like Jennings could surprise even himself. A computer programmer from Salt Lake City, Jennings had competed in quiz bowl events during high school and college. A turn on Jeopardy would be a kick. So in the summer of 2003, he and a friend drove from Salt Lake City to the Jeopardy studios in Culver City and took the qualifying exam. Jennings was pleased to pass it. And he was surprised, nine months later, to get the call that he’d been selected to play. He promptly started cramming his head with facts and dates about movies, kings, and presidents.