‘Jeopardy!’ Slammed by Fans for ‘Poorly Worded Clue’ Leading to Major ToC Upset

Dan Clarendon March 10, 2024, 11:06 am

A clue that led to Cris Pannullo’s surprise defeat in the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions has fans “mega” upset.

In the tournament’s quarterfinal game that aired on February 26, a Jeopardy! round cue in the “Memory” category read: In comparing computer memory info, think before you give us this, the number of megabytes in a gigabyte.

Pannullo lost $1,000 with a response of “1,000,” while competitor Jared Watson won a grand by responding with “1,024.”

Now fans are criticizing the game show’s writers for what one Reddit user called a “poorly worded clue.”

Yo @jeopardy I'ma need you to read this:https://t.co/x6x9auCYR1

A gigabyte can be either 1000 or 1024 megabytes; there are multiple competing standards.

— IT'S COVARR IT'S COVARR IT'S COVARR IT'S COVARR (@ItsCovarr) February 27, 2024

“Technically,” another Reddit user wrote, “[Pannullo and Watson] are both correct. Units based on power of 10 (where 1,000 would be the correct response) are the standard per the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This is the standard for most storage capacity, including most hard drives and flash memory. MacOS and Ubuntu are common operating systems that use this definition. Units based on power of 2 (where 1,024 would be the correct response) are the standard for random access memory (RAM) and for the Windows operating system.”

A third user wrote, “As a computer science guy, I was thinking the same thing.”

No there aren't 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte, there are 1024 mebibytes in a gibibyte and 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte… fix the score #jeopardy

— eNarwhal (@EvilNarwhal) February 27, 2024

Someone else commented, “It’s a poorly-done trick question because the actual answer is the first thing most non-computer people would think of: 1,000. I was screaming to my wife about it, and she said, ‘Well, let’s see if there’s a score correction,’ but alas, there was none.”

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One Reddit user, meanwhile, cited an article from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology website, which noted that the standards board for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) “decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted definitions of the [International System of Units] prefixes” such that “‘mega’ will mean 1,000,000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body.”

And someone else pointed out that the IEC created “binary prefixes” like mebibyte and gibibyte to differentiate power-of-two multipliers from the power-of-10 multipliers suggested by prefixes like “mega” and “giga,” as TechTarget reports.

Ultimately, the discussion is academic, as Watson would have won the February 26 quarterfinal even if Pannullo had been granted the $1,000 for his “1,000” response. It wouldn’t have been a runaway game in that case, but Watson was still the only contestant who gave the correct response to the Final Jeopardy! clue.

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