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The Man Who Knew Too Much
theodp writes "For thrilling competition, Slate says the Tour de France pales next to the 25-game reign of Jeopardy! supercontestant Ken Jennings. The 30-year-old software engineer has won a total of $788,960, beating the previous record-holder by a margin of over $600,000. Watching KenJen play is like witnessing any great athlete in top form: He's the Michael Jordan of trivia, the Seabiscuit of geekdom, and his antics have once again made Jeopardy! required viewing. (Update: 26 wins and $828,960: 'When Jennings ran the Marvel comics category during the second round, host Alex Trebek asked: Have you done anything besides read comics? It pays to be a nerd, Jennings responded.')"
Oh lord, I hope they don't make a movie about this guy forty years from now and expose him as some kind of patsy in an elaborate scheme to sell more vitamin juice for old people.
I also reply below your current threshold.
I'm actually really impressed that this man is getting so much respect (and money!) for how much he knows. Most of it is useless trivia, but to most people, that comes across as intelligence...a man is getting respect for his intelligence, on daytime TV. Awesome.
Personally, I thought it was wonderful when Jennings announced that his good luck charm was a stuffed Totoro doll from Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro), a Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki animated film. (See nausicaa.net for more)
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
Not only does Ken know a lot, he's got his "signalling button fu" working. He's going to be hard to beat as a result of that alone, as we've seen. But even when he guesses, he seems to guess correctly, so there's no doubt about the breadth of his knowledge. Go Ken!
I had only heard about him until two days ago when he won his 25th in a row, and his winnings for that day were only $14,000, which was his lowest in all 25 games.
People being celebrated for their intelligence and wit, and not their looks or physical attributes. Are we still in America? What happened here?
:D
Anyone remember the episode of Sliders where Quinn (sp) was on the game show of extremely high level math and science questions (while throwing a ball). The perfect world for geeks
This is not high esteem for a man who does well on a game show.
This is high esteem for a man who does well on a game show by showing of his gargantuan brain. This is high esteem for a man who has probably forgotten more trivia than most of us currently know. This is high esteem for a geek pressing his advantage in an arena suited to his forte.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
If our culture is headed down the path of having high esteem for people who appear and do successfully on game shows--boy are we screwed.
Yeah, we need to get back to the traditional values of throwing a ball and running fast.
"If his winning streak continues, Jennings could become the most celebrated software engineer in America." :)
Engineers can put probes on Mars and take pictures of Jupiter, but if you want to be celebrated, you must go on TV
Underholdning.info
No. If you watch him play, he gets answers wrong from time to time. In Millionaire, he'd be screwed, and bounce back to $16000 or $32000 for a wrong answer, and he'd be done. In Jeopardy! a wrong answer erases a bit of case, but only small amounts, and he does not get kicked off the show. Instead he get to continue. All he has to do is be better than the other two contestants, and know a bunch of trivia.
Firstly, I don't think he's cheating. People we're speculating on it the last time he was /.'d but he's just under too much scrutiny. The elimination of the five win rule set the stage for this new form of Jeopardy and I can't see how it can change from here unless the reinstate the rule. Ken will stay on top until someone like Ken but better comes along, and it stands to reason that whoever can beat him will remain unbeatable for a long run until some equally rare triv-master knocks them out. I noticed that last night when he referred to himself as a 'nerd' Trebek quickly insisted he was anything but; He used to seem more antagonistic to him. It's like Alex has Stockholm syndrome now that his show has been taken hostage by Ken. I wonder if the people who select the questions will deliberately start stacking the questions to exploit his weakspots or maybe they won't given the ratings boost he's bringing them.
Anyway, here's to Ken!
Uh.. What is google?
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On Millionaire, who the heck would he call for his Lifeline?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
http://boards.sonypictures.com/boards/forumdisplay .php?s=50aa46369dcf5a3280b1ed37548dfe79&forumid=34
These are the actual message boards for Jeopardy and Ken Jennings posts there frequently on such topics. They also have running tallies of his scores and precantages. Kinda cool information if you like that kind of stuff. Also I have watched most of Ken's game and this guy is amazing with the amount of trivia he knows.
According to this story and countless others, the tapings occurred in February. The next tapings are scheduled for August.
If Ken didn't lose by the end of his season, then he could be back for those tapings. I assume the current season will continue airing even during these tapings, and while Jeopardy has been extremely good at keeping the length of the streak under wraps, I imagine if KJ shows up in August, we're going to hear about it from somebody.
I think the obvious answer is the simplest one:
He is a cybernetic mutant from the future that was programmed to have all of the answers to a series of game show questions so that he could be sent back in time, win the prize money, and then use said money to fund his killing spree which eventually allows the robots to rise up and take over the earth while only a handful of humans remain plotting to overthrow the robot regime and one day reign supreme again.
And hookers. He is going to blow a ton of that cash on whores.
I know I would.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
When I watch Jeopardy!, I childishly yell out "Triple Stumper!" whenever I know the correct response and all three of the contestants either get it wrong or don't respond, and I'll sometimes do a little dance.
And if that happens during Final Jeopardy, I yell out "Final Jeopardy Triple Stumper!" and I'll break into an extended, elaborate dance, not unlike a wide receiver dancing in the endzone after a touchdown. I get maybe one of those every three months. The evening when I performed that dance while watching Jeopardy! with my girlfriend and her parents is particularly memorable.
Then there was a friend of mine who got a "Ultimate Mega Final Jeopardy Triple Stumper," where he correctly guessed the response before the clue was even given, knowing only the category, and all three contestants got it wrong. As I recall, his head exploded. That was quite a day.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
There was a guy in Croatia who made a nice income from the local version of the show. I think he was eventually banned as a phone a friend. Here you go.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Basicially this is it in a nutshell.
-Michael Larson at the time was unemployed. He became obsessed with game shows thinking that he could get on one and outsmart the system to win on it.
-He starting watching Press your luck and realized that the pattern was psudorandom and completely reversed engenerred the Random pattern, and even perfected a button pressing method to be as precise as possible
-Mike applied to be a contestant on Press your luck, and eventually got the green light to get on. CBS Producers commented that his demeanor was different from other contestants and they were suspicious of him, but couldn't find anything wrong so he got the go ahead.
-Once on the show, In the beginning, he acted just like any other contestant, and went through the question and answer session pretty unenentfully.
-the spin round, was where it got interesting. The First thing Mike did was get a whammy. It's believed that he did it on purpose to get a feel of the button to the board interaction and also not to look like he was blantently hacking the board.
-after the first whammy, it was all big bucks from there. he would almost always either hit big bucks or another space on the "wheel" that he knew would never popup a whammy. The whole time doing it he was in some sort of trancelike state.
-The second Q&A Session goes underway, already he's won a good amount of money but CBS hasn't seen anything yet. CBS Producers are going nuts in the back, more than aware that he's got the system beat from his first round performance. Peter Tomarken is basicially shocked at this point.
-Second round comes around. Mike basicially spins and never stops, collecting even more spins and more money. it gets to the point that Peter is beyond stunned now and doesn't know how to react to this, CBS is going insane in the back, and the episode is running way out of bounds for it's time.
-Mike breaks the $100,000 barrier. at this point he's won more money than was not only thought possible, but has broke the daytime money winnings record.
-finally, he gets frightened that he's going to screw up and get a whammy, so he passes the spins.
-eventually, some spins he has to take get passed to him. Wins Even more money. until basicially all the spins are gone.
-in the end, CBS "retired" him as champion, and originally would not pay him for cheating. eventually they paid him when their lawyers advised thm that they would lose because their wheel was too predictive. They aired te show as a two day show, because it was so long, they increased the patterns, and added more whammy slots where there originally were none.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
If you're going to reliably answer a question about who happened to be president in a given year, then you pretty much have to know the entire chronology of the presidency
Just like if you had a towel then you pretty much have to be in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc.
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet (apparantly). Ken Jennings has a webpage! I'm sorry to report to the /. crowd that it was designed in MS Word. But it seems to be more of a personal checklist (and a window into how he got so much "useless" knowledge) than a page he intended for other people to see.
And as far as the record goes, an important factor is that until recently after 5 wins a champion was retired, and would only come back for a tournament of champions. So he's the first "champion" to be given this opportunity.
Which is not to imply that he's not preternaturally smart, just that there's more to it than just trivia capacity.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.