Anagrams | Final Jeopardy! | JEOPARDY! MASTERS

A Final #Jeopardy! that has us all scrambled up.

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#jeopardy

[Lava]

As a Scrabble player, I deal with anagrams all the time and I had no idea where this clue was going. That was brutally difficult.

[Magzillas]

"Logarithms" were made obsolete by computers? Try telling that to like, any mathematician. Logarithm *tables* perhaps, but now we're well off the clue. Writers probably thought they were being clever but this is an abysmally written clue, especially for FJ and especially for Masters.

[KevinKemper]

Logarithms are NOT obsolete. Decibels are logarithmic, bacterial growth is logarithmic, the fundamental bit width of computer processors are derived by the log base two of the addressable accessible memory. I use logs every day ON A COMPUTER! This question needs to be deemed invalid and a do-over done for this final Jeopardy!

[Yokovich_]

My life is dedicated to computer science and that question was near impossible.

[bloodgain]

WTF? I have a Masters in Comp Sci, love word games, and am a recovering pendant, and that one still baffled me.

After knowing the answer (or question, for you unrepentant pendants), I'm still not happy with it. Logarithms are also fundamental to computer science. We use them for many important operations, and we seek out algorithms with logarithmic complexity (there's a clue for you, writers!). Lookup tables aren't even obsolete yet; the books may have gone away, but even computers often use them to speed up the calculation of a log, even if it's being calculated directly on the chip using an assembly call. The writers were out of their league in this one.

[MuffinsAPlenty]

Terrible clue, and the reason I say this is because it's impossible to get the second word on its own and deduce the first word from there. The only way to do this clue is to get the first word and deduce the second word via anagram. (So it only goes one way, not both ways.) Plus, I'm sure plenty of people would disagree that the second word was made obsolete by computers anyway. Sure, the second word is not used in the same ways as it was prior to computers, but there are still plenty of applications.

[bigz]

I have a bachelor's in computer science, have been a developer for 20 years, and I came up with allocation and collation. I realize now, typing them out that they're not quite anagrams ("allocation" has an extra "a") but I think collation has been made more obsolete by computers than logarithms. The natural logarithm is a foundational principle of math, for pete's sake!

I was thinking of "algorithms" for the first part but couldn't figure out what would have been made obsolete.

[BlueCrystalTear]

How on earth could anyone figure that out in 30 seconds? We have three insanely smart people here who were all mystified by this poorly worded clue, so if they can't get it, nobody can.

Also... aren't logarithms still very much a thing? I remember learning about them in high level math classes.

[mr.timetraveler]

I was laughing at the different comments Mattea made throughout the game! 😂

[gakuka]

Dear heavens, that is an insane answer. On one hand wildly difficult in terms of anagrams, and on the other hand completely incorrect. Logarithms are largely obsolete now? Solving them by hand, maybe, but logarithms are still wonderfully useful. Unless we're saying all of math is obsolete now that we have computers. That's cold, Jeopardy.

[eaguru]

I guessed it from getting algorithm for the first part and thinking of what word is an anagram of that. I did have to pause the show and think about it for a bit.

[drjcup]

When three Masters have no clue what the answer is, you know it’s a terrible question.

Who thought this was a good FJ question??!?

[tmhc_gtgc]

They should have said that having to look them up in tables printed in books was made obsolete by computers. The first part also didn't make sense since it seemed to be referring to a physical part of a computer.

[TonyCrenshawsLatte]

I thought of "abacus, " and tried to think of an anagram of that to no avail. Even so, I think I was more on point than what the actual "correct" response was.

[theweysermanisback]

Thank G-d, Mattea Roach won a game in Season 2 of J! Masters.

[mr.timetraveler]

This was the most intense game I've seen in Masters! All three players were dominant at one point in the game! I thought Amy was going to win her second game in a row!

[waldron]

That's the type of question you need more than 30 seconds.

[sureshmukhi]

Logarithms are NOT obsolete! They're still needed to solve exponential equations. Wrong clue.

[eyreaus]

Rough question. Also, want more category posts. Twenty a night I'm sure posting one or two of those won't hurt the Final J crowd.

[jad]

I guess the key was If you could somehow guess "algorithm" for the first part, and then rearrange those letters to get "logarithm."