Matt Amodio, the Ph.D student at Yale, is now over $500,000 in winnings on Jeopardy! as he continues with a 16-game winning streak.
Along the way, he’s annoyed fans by answering everything with “What is …” or “What’s …” and that includes answers about people, as in “What’s Joe Buck?” not the grammatically-correct “Who is.”
But there’s a reason for that … and it makes a whole lot of sense.
In an interview with the website for Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, he revealed his secret: it’s so that he can concentrate more on the rest of the clue and not focus on which part of speech to use. It’s kind of brilliant, isn’t it?
Here’s the Q&A:
Your answering style prompted some controversy, but Jeopardy! producers defended it.
Yes, I have a strategy where I form all of my questions with a “what’s” at the beginning – then, I can focus on the rest of the clue. Other people have been very upset about me being robotic instead of forming a question differently each time. I was glad that Jeopardy! said this was perfectly within the rules. I’ve watched Jeopardy! every day of my life, so I knew it was OK.
You’re just eliminating unnecessary mental labor.
That’s the kind of thing we do in computer science all the time. You have a section of your program and it does “A” or it does “B” and it has to decide which. Then you realize “Wait, we never actually need to do ‘B,’” so you cut that off and just leave a smaller bit of program. It’s cleaner and where there are fewer things moving, there are fewer things that can go wrong.
No wonder he keeps winning.
