the most beautiful game show moment: Scott Weiss breaks Jeopardy!

[selinker]

What: The end of the March 16, 2007, episode of the quiz show Jeopardy!, which featured the only nonzero three-way tie in the program's history. Here is the Final Jeopardy showdown.

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Why: As it headed to commercial before Final Jeopardy, the March 16 episode looked to be like most others in the four decades since Jeopardy! debuted: one contestant

Comments

[mckitterick]

Scott Weiss is a wonderful human being. And Kseniya Simonova's work? Holy mackerel. Can you imagine how much it must have sucked to have been competing against her. I mean, hey! I can tap-dance! Um, is anyone watching? *cries and runs off stage*

[selinker]

I give it a year till Simonova, Susan Boyle, whatever chimpanzee America sends, and the rest are matched head to head in "Earth's Got Talent."

[zotmeister]

Oh dear - I could probably write a thesis on this topic. I'll try - and largely fail - to keep this concise. Your list is stellar, by the way.

Someone else already mentioned Michael Larson, and I can understand why you've chosen to pan him. I can't argue that, but as a computer scientist and puzzlesmith I find a great intrinsic beauty in his discovery of the patterns. Who else could say they solved a game show? Maybe his moment on the show is of debatable beauty - as was his work ethic - but his true accomplishment came before he appeared on camera, and that is beautiful to me, regardless of motivation. It was also beautiful to me - for a completely different reason I have trouble denoting - that his brother won the reunion/rematch on Whammy!.

I'm always impressed by "the right answer the answerer didn't think was right". Chuck Woolery beating himself at his own game is perhaps the best straightforward example of this, although the legendary "She makes diet pills!" will probably be the greatest of all time, mainly for Daly's

[selinker]

I hadn't heard of a lot of those, Adam. Good stuff.

If I have to pick one game show host, that'd be Groucho Marx.

[ertchin]

Very late, but another moment on a Peter Tomarken show where someone doesn't play the game exactly like the producers probably wanted is here.

[selinker]

That's quite a hack. It seems vulnerable to non-symmetric distributions of right answers, in ways I can't explain (but thedan probably can).

[ertchin]

I think I can ... if you switch and the number drops, switch back, and those two are now marked correctly. If you switch and the number increases, leave them alone and they're marked correctly. But if the number stays the same, they're either both right or both wrong, and you can't yet tell which.

If you have a pretty good memory, you could go past those pairs and play them out in different combinations after you've gone over the board once. But you could well run out of time if the board is sufficiently against you.