Name: 【TED】Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all (Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all)
Uploaded: 2017-08-09T05:32:34.000Z
Duration: 17 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Timothy Covell Reviewer: Morton Bast

In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary

of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set.

And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics,

is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead.

Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever.

And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all.

I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me.

For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as,

as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff.

I feel like that was always sort of my destiny,

although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet.

If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager,

it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name.

And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years.

But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there.

I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad

with whatever great fact I had just read about --

or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was.

I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same.

And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work.

And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows.

I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979

because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school,

that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud."

I remember running home from school every day to watch the show.

It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house.

And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working,

where there was only one English language TV channel.

and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching.

So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy."

I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid.

I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s

and holding my own, back when that was a fad.

when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know.

You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know.

And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power --

the right fact deployed at exactly the right place.

who thought this was a legitimate career path,

or be a professional ex-game show contestant.

I didn't try to figure out what one does with that.

I studied computers because I heard that was the thing,

not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004.

And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background --

when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying,

they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.'

And of course I said yes, for several reasons.

One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time.

It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on.

but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons.

I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have.

And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future.

was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future,

is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win.

I had taken some artificial intelligence classes.

I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy."

People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program

that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English

and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings,

The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do,

And I thought, well this is going to be child's play.

Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species.

as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this,

I started to get occasional updates from them,

and I started to get a little more worried.

I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph.

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【TED】Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all (Ken Jennings: Watson, Jeopardy and me, the obsolete know-it-all)

stuff

sort

realize

dumb