Roger Craig Wins Jeopardy Championship with Knowledge Tracking

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Alexandra Carmichael

Roger Craig had a dream of being on Jeopardy, and he took a QS approach to making it happen. He downloaded all historical Jeopardy questions and answers into a database, clustering the questions by topic and keyword, and built a web tool around it to quiz himself. He visualized his answers to see where his knowledge gaps were and help him optimize his learning. Roger actually got to test his system by playing some actual rounds of Jeopardy, with surprising results! UPDATE: This week, Roger won the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions and became the show’s 4th highest winner in history. Congratulations, Roger! If you haven’t seen his video below, check it out. (Filmed at the NY Quantified Self Show&Tell #13 at NYU ITP.)

This entry was posted in Videos and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

18 Responses to Roger Craig Wins Jeopardy Championship with Knowledge Tracking

  1. gwern says:
    September 27, 2011 at 8:54 am

    Did I hear him correctly that he is reviewing his flashcards *randomly*?

    I can’t believe no one has told him about spaced repetition! What a waste.

    Reply

  2. Pingback: Roger Craig on Knowledge Tracking | Quantified Self | AbundantKnowledge.info™

  3. Roger Craig says:
    September 30, 2011 at 9:41 am

    @gwern , I’m not sure which sentence you’re referring to.
    I did randomly sample the corpus for diagnostic purposes, but reviewing of material is almost always in a spaced repetition framework.

    I have used spaced repetition software for many many years. e.g. Here’s a mention of my use of Anki in Stephen Baker’s book on the Watson matches, Final Jeopardy:
    http://books.google.com/books?id=CwLSrDUoVB0C&lpg=PA214&dq=craig%20anki&pg=PA214#v=onepage&q=craig%20anki&f=false

    Reply
  4. Jake says:
    October 2, 2011 at 4:08 pm

    Very impressive. It makes my attempts to do something similar look like child’s play.

    So Roger, do you have any plans to open your tracker/website up to others?

    Reply
  5. Roger Craig says:
    October 4, 2011 at 9:01 pm

    @Jake , Yes. In some format/way, but not right now. The main reason for holding back for now is that the vast majority of the questions are the intellectual property of Jeopardy!, not myself. I do plan on taking this project further though, stay tuned!

    Reply
    • Matt says:
      November 15, 2011 at 8:24 pm

      Congratulations Roger. I am a college student and currently use a website called quizlet.com to study. You would be doing myself and millions of other students a great service if you would let us upload our own questions to your site to study. I would love to beta test it for you

      Reply
  6. Peter Bengtsson says:
    November 13, 2011 at 11:12 am

    How did he manage to download old Jeopardy questions?! I want that too.

    Reply
  7. Aaron says:
    November 15, 2011 at 2:18 pm

    I can think of several graduate level test prep sites that would heavily benefit from your method – namely the USMLE Step 1 (Medical Licensing Exam Step 1). Have you considered going that route with your program?

    Reply
  8. Robert LeRoy Parker says:
    November 15, 2011 at 10:42 pm

    What an incredible victory in the ToC! The back to back daily doubles in day one of the final was the greatest moment I’ve seen on Jeopardy. Legendary stuff.

    Reply
  9. Maxim says:
    November 15, 2011 at 11:12 pm

    Roger,

    Is there any way to adapt this to studying for university students? Also, is there anywhere I can find more information on Knowledge Tracking, or “learning how to learn”?

    Thanks!

    Reply
  10. gwern says:
    November 17, 2011 at 6:20 pm

    To the admins: reposting this article broke the old link http://quantifiedself.com/2011/09/roger-craig-on-knowledge-tracking/ (404), which breaks all links to the original one, including to my personal knowledge the link on Wikipedia, on my site, and LessWrong. Could you put in a redirect or something?

    Reply
  11. wood says:
    November 19, 2011 at 4:40 pm

    hi roger,
    good job on the show! i watched it.
    just want to ask if it is ok, how did you parse the jarchive and put it on a database? were there any tools that you use to do this easily?

    thanks!

    Reply

  12. Pingback: Le self tracking ou comment devenir le 4ème plus grand vainqueur de Jeopardy | Self Tracking France

  13. MedStudent says:
    February 8, 2012 at 1:36 pm

    Hey Roger,

    I’ve been studying for the USMLE all year and I feel that my knowledge has plateaued, but I still only get 85% on every test. The 15% is not always in the same subjects. I was wondering if there is something I can do to to increase my score. I know Step1 is not a game, but I thought that maybe it also has a weakness.
    Please let me know if you have any ideas on maximizing my knowledge on high held info.

    Thanks in advance
    MedStudent

    Reply

  14. Pingback: 6 Counter-Intuitive Ways to Beat Popular Game Shows « NeuroBolt

  15. Pingback: I’m Back! « Dru's Projects

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

CAPTCHA Image

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.