What are the odds...

[tvmitch]

That any given American knows someone who has been on Jeopardy!?

For the sake of argument, I'll define "knows" as "has communicated with." Not "Oh, Joe, his friend Jim Bob was on Jeopardy." That doesn't count.

I'm wondering if it's comparable to the adage that if you put 27 (or whatever) people in the same room, it's someone's birthday.

Perhaps TPiR might be a good show to pose this question as well, but "I know Bob, he was on Jeopardy!" is more culturally significant.

[Dbacksfan12]

[quote name=\'tvmitch\' post=\'229247\' date=\'Oct 26 2009, 04:48 PM\']That any given American knows someone who has been on Jeopardy!?

For the sake of argument, I'll define "knows" as "has communicated with." Not "Oh, Joe, his friend Jim Bob was on Jeopardy." That doesn't count.[/quote]I've talked to Chad Mosher 10 times or so on AIM.  Not intended to be a knock on him at all, but I wouldn't say I know him.

[Jimmy Owen]

Never met anyone face-to-face that has been on the show.  WOF and Weakest Link, yes.

[MikeK]

I went to elementary school with a 2-time champion from last season.

[mmb5]

As I sit typing in the Million Dollar Living Room™, asking here unless you get a math-based answer is going to skew the results.  This board itself has a higher proportion of J! contestants than the average world, and I can think of at least 25 I've met.  I don't mean that to name drop, it's just some people are going to skew the curve more than the birthday problem, since people really don't develop social circles based on birthdays.  Not to mention the numbers for contestant coordinators.

Figure there's been about 8,000 episodes with at least two unique contestants, so at least 16,000 have played.  You have 30 seconds.


--Mike

[TimK2003]

For The Price is Right (not including my wife):
I used to work with a television sports reporter who was on TPIR (Played Hole In One Or Two).
There is a morning row show co-host who also got called down to Contestant's Row (did not make it up on stage).

Both of these people and myself all live(d) in a town of only 50,000.


For Wheel of Fortune:
I used to work in radio with a guy who 10 years later became a contestant (won a bit of money, but not the day).

[Twentington]

I don't know anyone personally who has been on a game show. Closest I can say is my mom, who was at a TTTT taping in the mid-70s. She doesn't remember a thing about it.

[trainman]

Wait, we don't all count as personal friends of Matt Ottinger?

Okay, in "real life," I personally know two "Jeopardy!" contestants -- a 1994 College Tournament contestant who lost in the quarterfinals

• , and a 2000 regular-game contestant who lost his game (to Robin Carroll, eventual winner of that year's Tournament of Champions).  So there -- I'm skewing the odds.
• But later did a couple of video clues for subsequent College Tournaments, in her capacity as a writer for the show "Malcolm in the Middle."

I also know a (losing) Teen Week contestant from the Bill Rafferty "Card Sharks"...and have an aunt who was an impostor on daytime "To Tell the Truth" circa 1966 or 1967 (considers herself a winner because Kitty Carlisle voted for her).

[aaron sica]

Not counting the internet, where anyone can say they know someone who's been on a game show, I met one former J! contestant 21 years ago. He was a University professor in the town where I lived (Bloomsburg) who'd been on the show recently (I knew about it as there was a newspaper article, and I went and chatted with him for a bit). I don't recall his name but wish I did...

[Mr. Armadillo]

[quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'229259\' date=\'Oct 26 2009, 07:47 PM\']Figure there's been about 8,000 episodes with at least two unique contestants, so at least 16,000 have played.  You have 30 seconds.[/quote]
So we're talking roughly one in every 20,000 Americans.  Divide that by the number of people that an average person 'knows'.

(Me, personally?  One of the guys I butted heads against in high school academic bowl was Jeopardy! champion for eight weeks.  Only won one game, but it was the final regular game of Season 23.)

/The Price is Right has had well over 60,000 contestants.
//The Chamber had, what, 20?

[gameboy2000]

One of my former college instructors was on the original Jeopardy with Art Fleming.

[tvmitch]

[quote name=\'Mr. Armadillo\' post=\'229290\' date=\'Oct 27 2009, 10:56 AM\'][quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'229259\' date=\'Oct 26 2009, 07:47 PM\']Figure there's been about 8,000 episodes with at least two unique contestants, so at least 16,000 have played.  You have 30 seconds.[/quote]
So we're talking roughly one in every 20,000 Americans.  Divide that by the number of people that an average person 'knows'.
[/quote]
Yes, this is where I was going with this. GSF folks, lovely as we are, do not represent my proposed sample. We're not figuring J! players who have passed on from this life, but for the sake of this hypothetical argument, I think those connections should count anyway.

How many folks does the average person "know," then? I'm thinking that the final answer for this could be about 5%, perhaps? (Put 20 random people in a room and someone knows someone who was on J!.) Or is that too low? Or too high?

[Mr. Armadillo]

5% would mean that the average American "knows", on average, about a thousand people.  

I'm no sociologist (although I do have a minor in that), and it depends on our definition of the word "knows", so I can't really state for a fact whether or not that number is wholly accurate.  It feels a bit high, though.

I'm thinking that the final answer for this could be about 5%, perhaps? (Put 20 random people in a room and someone knows someone who was on J!.) Or is that too low? Or too high?

(As an act-sci major, I can, however, tell you that this does not work like you think it does.  If each person has a 5% chance of knowing someone on J!, then a room full of 20 random people only has a 64.15% chance of containing someone who knows someone on J!, due to the fact that it's possible that more than one person in the room falls within that 5%.)

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'trainman\' post=\'229270\' date=\'Oct 26 2009, 11:46 PM\']Wait, we don't all count as personal friends of Matt Ottinger?[/quote]
I certainly like to think of you all that way!

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Mr. Armadillo\' post=\'229349\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 08:33 AM\']5% would mean that the average American "knows", on average, about a thousand people.  

I'm no sociologist (although I do have a minor in that), and it depends on our definition of the word "knows", so I can't really state for a fact whether or not that number is wholly accurate.  It feels a bit high, though.[/quote]
Do you think? Looking at Facebook, I have 174 friends. That's just on Facebook, just people I know personally (save for about three), and people I know and like well enough to have accepted to be on my friends list. (And not being a friend whore, that's a higher bar than many.)

That doesn't count a lot of people I know at work, people I know who are friends of mine who aren't on Facebook, old school buddies who haven't found me on FB yet or aren't there themselves, and a whole lot of people who I know but who I wouldn't spit on if they were on fire. 174 people, just on this one isolated service, and 98% of which I know and have interacted with personally.

(And that doesn't include a single one of my relatives, either. Just counting parents, grandparents, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, alive and dead, that's probably another 30-40, easy. Maybe more.)

So if anything I would suggest that 1000 actually feels a bit *low*.