Analyze “Jeopardy Pavlovs” with Python | by Katy Hagerty | September 2023

Using Python and Data Analytics to Test the Strength of Jeopardy Pavlovs

Jeopardy is one of the most popular game shows in the United States. On each show, contestants answer a trivia question and must respond with the correct question. Each game consists of three rounds with 13 categories and 61 questions. Categories include everything from science to popular culture and puns to foreign languages.

Over the years, fans discovered that certain keywords were automatic rewards for the correct answer and dubbed these pairs “Jeopardy Pavlovs.” For example, if the clue contains “single president”, the correct answer is often “Who is James Buchanan?”

I recently found an Anki deck of Jeopardy Pavlovs and wrote a few Python scripts to test them.

All code for this project is available at GitHub Or Deep note.

First, I needed a database of past clues on Jeopardy. I used a Kaggle dataset containing clues to shows broadcast between 1984 and 2019.

In accordance with the Jeopardy format, the answer the column contains the indices, and the question The column contains the correct answer. For the sake of simplicity, the question The column does not formulate the correct answer as a question.