It’s official! April 11 1954 was the most boring day in history.
Every day events of significance occur: a person is born who is destined for fame; events happen in the arts or sports and history is created.
We are building a knowledge base of the world's knowledge. Unlike a search engine, which finds relevant web pages statistically using keywords, True Knowledge (www.trueknowledge.com) is able to understand the knowledge it stores, reason with it and produce direct answers to questions. It also has an understanding of the importance of the entities referenced in these facts.
You can use True Knowledge to find out what happened on a particular day. For example, questions like these produce good results:
It occurred to us that with over 300 million facts, a big percentage of which tie events, people and places to points in time, we could uniquely calculate an objective answer to the question 'What was the most boring day in history?' For fun, we wrote a script to scan all days (from the beginning of the 20th century) and set it going.
‘Boring’ is a subjective term. A 14-year old has a very different idea of boring to a 45-year old. In this case we used the almost equivalent concept ‘uneventful’ and found the day when the smallest number of important things happened (or were happening).
When the script completed, we had an answer:
Sunday, April 11, 1954
Nobody significant died that day, no major events apparently occurred and although a typical day in the 20th century has many notable people being born, for some reason that day had only one person that might make that claim: Abdullah Atalar - a Turkish academic.
The irony is though, that having done the calculation, the day is now interesting for being exceptionally boring! Perhaps we need to calculate the second most boring day...
