April 11th, 1954: The Most Boring Day?
Things are constantly happening, it feels like every day there’s new stuff going on that the News wants you to know. Add on top of that, social media where everyone wants you to know their stuff while at the same time giving their opinion on the other stuff.
Sure, you could just not watch the news, get off the internet, and sit quietly in a corner of a room but guess what, things are still happening. The world doesn’t stop just because you’re not paying attention.
Related Article: The Facts on Doomscrolling
If I don’t look at it then it’s not happening
But there must have been a boring day in history right? That’s exactly what William Turnstall-Pedoe wondered and he had the means to figure it out. In 2010 Turnstall-Pedoe used his artificial intelligence search engine called True Knowledge to determine the most boring or uneventful day, April 11th, 1954.
How it Works
Turnstall-Pedoe, a Cambridge University graduate, had created and worked on True Knowledge since 2005. Unlike most search engines that look for your answer based on keywords, True Knowledge broke down your question, looked at the relevant topics, and tried to give you a more accurate answer from its own database.
Think of it like this; other search engines know the answer to your question while True Knowledge can understand your question to find the answer. Does it make a difference to the average person? Probably not, as long as the search engine gives me my answer, I don’t care how it does it.
Still not using Bing though
In 2010, Turnstall-Pedoe estimated True Knowledge had 300 million pieces of information, things like deaths, birthdays, and world events. Using this data he had True Knowledge calculate the most boring day since 1900 because if he went further back it wouldn’t be as interesting.
Imagine if True Knowledge said the most boring day was a day in 4,000 B.C.E., no one would be impressed. We’d all just say “duh”, question how much it cost to create True Knowledge, and then ask why anyone spent that much money for a program to tell us something no one was wondering, and something that, frankly, we could have figured out on our own.
April 11th, 1954
So what happened on April 11th, 1954? Well, there were a few people born who would become notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, like David Perrett; a psychologist, Teo Peter; a musician, and Willie Royster; a baseball player.
There were also some events going on like a golf tournament, a Senior Hurling Championship, and a general election in Belgium. All of this was deemed not eventful or interesting by True Knowledge which is a sick burn but after reading ‘Senior Hurling Championship’, I get it.
The Future of True Knowledge
After this ‘discovery’ which feels more like a theory, Turnstall-Pedoe kept improving True Knowledge and used it to create a new Artificial Intelligence program called Evi pronounced like the Pokemon Eevee. Evi AI and Turnstall-Pedoe’s company Evi was later sold to Amazon and was used to create Amazon Alexa.
Now if Alexa ever goes full Terminator on us, we know who to blame and we’ll know what Terminator-Alexa’s real name is.
“Call me Eevee”
Quick Facts
Before being purchased by Amazon, Evi Al was first released as an app in 2012
William Tunstall-Pedoe worked for Amazon from 2012 to 2016, reportedly he sold his company, Evi to Amazon for $26 million.
