True Knowledge - Blog

Saint Patrick's day: a virtual pub quiz

When is St Patrick's Day? Yes, that's right, it's coming up to the 17th of March ... time to celebrate Saint Patrick and all things Irish!

Here at True Knowledge we thought it might be time for a virtual pub quiz...

1. Who invented Guinness?

2. What is Bono's real name?  

3. What is a limerick?

4. What is the population of Ireland?

5. What are the provinces of Ireland? 

6. Who wrote Waiting for Godot?

7. Where was Saint Patrick born?

8. Who is prime minister of Ireland?

9. What were James Joyce's last words?

10. Where is Saint Patrick the patron saint of?

OK, time to put your pens down and take up your glasses! Extra points if you managed to think of more than one answer to the last question. Maybe see you again next year...

 

English Football Hotbeds

It is one of the great football terrace debates.

From Merseyside and Manchester to the North East of England and the East End of London, certain parts of England have a reputation for being true football ‘hot beds’ that have generated a disproportionate amount of top talent down the years.

But which parts of the country can claim the crown for producing the most Premier League players? Which small towns punch well above their weight when it comes to nurturing soccer stars, and which areas lag well behind the rest of the country when it comes to producing top-flight talent?

So here are the answers to this and examples of our other football-related questions:

• Which English town has produced the most footballers?
• How many Premiership footballers were born in Liverpool?
• Where was Robbie Fowler born?
• Premiership footballers born in Solihull
• Who won the World Cup in 1990?

Interestingly, results from London suggest that good footballers can come from all classes, with richer boroughs producing as many top players as the traditional working class ones.  Play around with questions like What is the median wage for the London borough Lee Bowyer was born in? and median wage for Tower Hamlets to see some examples.

 

This survey came out of an office bet about where the most good footballers come from.  We realised that True Knowledge is uniquely placed to tell us.  Our mission is to teach a computer everything about the world, and we're already far enough along for the system to be the only one in the world capable of combining cross-domain knowledge to answer many questions like this.

Who knows - maybe Premier League scouts will use this to uncover the next generation of Rooneys, Gerrards and Beckhams and England.  Then years from now England win the World Cup thanks in some small part to our data!

Movies and mathematics

If you've ever wondered about different types of people are in your favourite movies, True Knowledge can help!  You can find out about people like yourselves in your favourite comedies with questions like Scorpios involved in Scream or Canadians involved in Shrek, or in musicals maybe you need reminding who was the dancer who starred in Evita.

Perhaps you're trying to choose a university.  You can get all the worthy details on which courses are good from anywhere, but which provides the best route into Hollywood?  No other site will answer all your questions like movies starring Harvard graduates or comedy movies directed by Princeton graduates.

Of course we've just had the Oscars - no big surprises among the winners but it was still worth getting them in so you can check all the less talked-about prizes like who won best screenplay in 2011?  And if you're a fan of the winners we can help with suggestions for what to watch next.  Try asking for lists like Tom Hooper movies or Colin Firth films for all your favourite stars and directors.  For checking different winners in past years we've got the set of comparison questions such as Who won Best Actor when Judi Dench won Best Supporting Actress? and Who won Best Actress when Helena Bonham Carter was nominated for it?

We don't really like to encourage cheating with homework but sometimes it's good just to check your answer really is right.  So there are new sets of geometry calculations like what is the circumference of a circle of radius 2m? and what is the volume of a sphere of radius 3 ft?

Then for arithmetic we've worked on factorisations eg prime factorisation of 2154 and factorials like factorial of 24.

Finally some UK postcode knowledge to give answers like postcodes for Milton for all British towns and villages, and first and last letters of words to help a bit with your crosswords eg 5 letter words starting with a and ending with y.