I wonder how many people could give you even an approximate chronology of the two assassinations, other than “old” and “very old.” Most of the people I encountered when working as a historic site guide thought Lincoln was president in the 1820s.
Oh, definitely, there’s a very large segment of the population who wouldn’t know anything about Caesar’s assassination. But we’re not talking about the general population here: We’re talking about the portion of the population who competes on Jeopardy, or at least the portion who attempts to play along at home. And I’d expect that, out of that subpopulation, the vast majority would know of Shakespeare’s play and “et tu, Brute”.
When Alex first read the clue, my mind immediately went to Rasputin. If I had stopped and thought about I probably would’ve thought of Caeser, but sometimes I get so excited when I think I know the answer right away I don’t reconsider.
There is a bug with “Jeopardy!” that irks me, and it happened again yesterday. Let’s say player aA has $5,800 dollars and Player B has $5,000. Player A answers an $800 question and is ruled incorrect. A’s score drops to $5,000. Player B then answers correctly and B’s score goes to $5,800.
Later, A’s answer is ruled correct, and they give A back $1,600 (the amount A lost for an incorrect answer and the amount for the correct answer). But they let B keep the $800 that B never would have gotten if they had ruled correctly in the first place.
This happened yesterday with the Blue Ridge Mountains answer one player gave, and last week with an Indiana Jones question.
Does this bother anyone else? Shouldn’t the player who answered on the rebound have to forfeit the money?
But it goes deeper than that. Player A also lost control of the board, which meant that the next clue, instead of being from A’s strongest category, was from B’s strongest category. And maybe in the category where A thought he was strongest, C was actually even stronger, and could have come back from behind, except that category ended up never getting touched before time ran out. And so on.
There’s no possible way to account for all of the what-ifs resulting from a mistakenly-ruled response. What they do is a compromise between letting the game stand as it originally was, and trying to figure out what would have been.
Also, people makes choices based on how much money they have. You might be more likely to ring in on a clue that you’re only 50% sure on if you have a big lead or you’re playing from behind. Not to mention betting strategy on Daily Doubles.
Quite true. Which is why I’m surprised whenever contestants miss a question like this. They are presumably more erudite than the average person, or they wouldn’t be on the show in the first place.
I also think it’s not just a matter of “either you know it or you don’t.” This may be true sometimes, but given a modicum of information on almost any subject, you can use deduction to come up with a pretty shrewd guess as to what the response should be.
Heck, for that question itself: “Died from being stabbed a bunch of times” doesn’t actually narrow it down to any single person. “First recorded autopsy in history” does, but it’s a fact that relatively few people would know (even in the Jeopardy demographic). But if you put them together, and follow some logical inferences, then you have that the person was probably pretty important (or they wouldn’t have gotten the previously rare or nonexistent autopsy), and was probably from ancient times (or earlier autopsies would be known), and “very important person from ancient times who died from being stabbed a lot of times” is narrow enough that it was probably the Big Gai. So even though I’d expect that most folks in the Jeopardy demographic should be able to get it, they wouldn’t get it by “just knowing it”.
Yes. Me. Always has. Although as someone else pointed out it’s perhaps the most reasonable compromise.
The actual wording of the clue was “One of the first recorded autopsies was performed on this man & revealed 23 puncture marks.” In addition to the above, it requires you to infer that the man was probably attacked by a large group of people, like the Roman Senate.
First thing that popped into my head was Saint Sebastian, but that was dashed against the rock of history (or lack thereof). Julius Caesar took a couple seconds more,
Same with me.
Yeah, I commented on this not long ago, in re the “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” deal. I understand that they can’t account for what would have happened in terms of controlling the board and so on, but why can’t they just deduct the money credited to the other player? That’s pretty simple.
That wording, in my view, would have reasonably ruled out Rasputin as the answer, given that the murder of Rasputin is most famous for the number of methods his assassins tried in order to dispatch him.
So if the question actually had been about Rasputin, it would either have had to mention the other methods (poison, drowning, etc.), or have mentioned that the puncture marks were only part of the findings of the autopsy.
So in this case I’d say the question-writers did a good job.
On another note: Sad that today was the last new episode of the season, given that we don’t know if Alex will still be host for the next.
Right, that may have quietly been the end of an era.
Ah, OK, if the clue just said “puncture marks”, rather than “stabbings”, I might have thought of Sebastian (or another arrow-victim), too.
One could still reason that it wouldn’t have been Sebastian, but it might have slowed me down enough to miss the 30 seconds.
I could have written that.
Probably because it would seem unfair to punish the other player, who did get it right, for an error that was not their fault.
Player #1 answers correctly but is ruled incorrect. Loses $500.
Player #2 answers differently but also correctly and is ruled correct. Wins $500.
(game continues)
Player #1 is retroactively ruled correct after all and is awarded $500.
Player #2 gets to keep $500.
(game continues)
In this scenario, Player #2 gets to keep a $500 advantage that never should have been available to him/her, effectively punishing both Players #1 AND #3 for an error that wasn’t their fault. Which is even more unfair than the existing rule.
But everything that happened after the correction is something that wouldn’t have happened. Or at least, it’s all stuff that wouldn’t have happened in that order or to those particular players.
So to be scrupulously fair, once a correction occurs, the entire game should be started over.
And they’re not going to do that.
The only thing they can do is to minimize the number of corrections needed.
(That leads me to wonder if anyone has ever done a statistical analysis of the percentage of all questions (= answers) that involve corrections. I bet such a number would differ over the years, based on the staffing, perhaps.)