Thursday, February 19, 2015 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

[Leaper]

For $1,600, name a computer related company known by three initials.

For $1,200, who was elected president in 1952?

Was this category left over from Kids' Week?

My theory for some of these Clue Crew categories is that if they make the key information any more complex than what they have on the show, what the question is actually ASKING gets lost in all the extra background verbiage.

[Stanislaus Jacob]

I haven't researched this at all, but I am very skeptical that pollsters in 1952 were calling the election for Stevenson. If they had, wouldn't that just be as famous as the bad predictions in favor of Dewey in 1948? At least Dewey kept it close.

Edit: I seem to be correct, although the final poll was closer than the final results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical ... on.2C_1952

In a nutshell, here's what happened. Physicist John Mauchly, who had co-invented the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania and went on to found the company that made the UNIVAC, had been barred from his own computer factory. In an era when communist witch-hunting was rampant, someone had wrongfully fingered him as politically disloyal and he'd temporarily lost his government security clearance pending a hearing. If his company was to keep its government contracts, he couldn't set foot through the door. To keep busy while in exile, working from his home, he and University of Pennsylvania statistician Max Woodbury worked on a fantastic new application for their brand-new commercial computer: election prediction. By studying trends in past returns, they believed they'd cracked the problem, and that they would be able to project the winner of the next election with a very small percentage of the returns in.

When it came to the night of the election, the computer ran their program and called it for Ike in a landslide: 438 electoral votes for Eisenhower, 93 for Stevenson. CBS told Mauchly and Woodbury, "There's no way we're airing that. Run the program again and make it closer." Around 9 p.m., viewers were told UNIVAC predicted that Eisenhower would with 8-7 odds. This result, however, was the product of an inadvertently added zero to Stevenson's total New York State votes. Another run with the corrected numbers and the odds went back to 100-1 Eisenhower.

Ultimately Eisenhower won 442-89 electoral (33,936,252 popular). UNIVAC's electoral prediction was within 1%, and its popular vote prediction of 32,915,000 was within 3%. Later in the night CBS issued an on-air apology, saying they should have believed the machine's first output.

The UNIVAC business was just a small part of CBS's election coverage. The network saw it as a gimmick, and didn't even show the actual computer on TV, instead building a mockup for TV purposes. But computerized projections were a part of every election thereafter.

Very interesting. Thank you. But it does seem clear (based on your account) that no one actually predicted a Stevenson victory - just a closer Eisenhower victory than proved to be the case (and UNIVAC correctly predicted a landslide).

[sillymonkey]

Sam mentioned in his interview that he dressed as Walter White one Halloween, complete with shaved head, glasses, and baggie of fake meth. I guess it's safe to assume the costume didn't also include the gift W.W. got from Gale that he kept at his bedside and later in his bathroom.

ClosingTime

Like!

[Robert K S]

it does seem clear (based on your account) that no one actually predicted a Stevenson victory - just a closer Eisenhower victory than proved to be the case (and UNIVAC correctly predicted a landslide).

Yeah, that's right. I think the Jeopardy! writers/researchers misunderstood the famous story, or fudged it in order to make it fit the clue's space constraints. It was never that Stevenson was predicted to be the winner, it's just that pollsters had been showing a neck-and-neck race, whereas UNIVAC (correctly) saw things differently once it was able to get its teeth on actual returns data.

The best part of the story is how human doubt cost CBS the big scoop. It was undoubtedly the first instance of a televised apology to an electronic computer.

[BigDaddyMatty]

And I was so glad they didn't have another "Nice Beard" category in DJ!

This deserved more love than it got. That's funny right there.

[TenPoundHammer]

I love how I can pick up on a TOM and still have no guess. "L of G is obviously something, but what?!... ... ... ... ... ... Ah screw it, this is probably another liederkranz" was my thought process almost verbatim. I know a few things, but it's like my brain shuts off entirely at FJ! And makes me say things like "wait, shoot, was there a speech JFK was famous for?"

[Silverfox]

This was one of my best games. 5/5 in Double, Just kidding, Please, no letters, Revolutionary war (visited Concord and Lexington last summer), and Movies.
24 correct in J and 21 in DJ. After some recent games in which I struggled, this game result felt very good. But not correct in FJ. Poets is one of my weaker areas, since I have not studied it since grade school in a prior century.

[ekoblentz]

Does anyone have a list of the questions and answers for the computer history category? This episode seems to have skipped at http://www.j-archive.com/showseason.php?season=31.

Thank you.

[dhkendall]

Does anyone have a list of the questions and answers for the computer history category? This episode seems to have skipped at http://www.j-archive.com/showseason.php?season=31.

Thank you.

Be patient, us Archivists sometimes have life getting in the way and can't get up the episode within a day or two. Someone may fulfil your request before the episode goes up, but it may be Archived soon too.

[Robert K S]

...unfortunately, the contestants saved the best for last and only got to two of the clues in the category before time ran out. The first to be revealed showed an early card punch apparatus. The second to be revealed showed a UNIVAC I console. Both were from the Computer History Museum. Here was the text of the clues:

COMPUTER HISTORY $1600: Punch-card tabulators vastly reduced the time needed to conduct the 1890 census and save taxpayers millions; they were created by Herman Hollerith, the father of modern automatic computation, who founded what is, today, this three-letter business giant

COMPUTER HISTORY $1200: Ushering in the era of big iron was UNIVAC, which, in 1952, became a star during CBS election coverage; polls said the race would go to Adlai Stevenson, but UNIVAC predicted this man would win in a landslide; UNIVAC was right

Linksy:
http://www.computerhistory.org/revoluti ... -cards/2/2
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/ha ... us-univac/