If you have all the questions and answers; couldn't you just study them? It's not as fun, but probably just as effective, depending on your ability to retain useless knowledge.
Appreciate this is a tangent, but if you learnt almost 30K trivia questions off by heart.. have you found that has benefitted you in other ways? Like, being killer at quiz shows or University Challenge or something? :-)
I got asked to be on a University Challenge team after someone saw me playing... but completely flopped when they asked independent questions at trials.
This kind of unlinked data leaks very fast, too: at my peak I had to top up with Anki for about 3 hours a day. I've forgotten almost all of it now.
A small consolation is that I can still tell you the 'exact number of gallons of water' in most major lakes.
Yeah, this sort of bullshit question is a go to for machines that need are ostensibly skill based but need a reliable way to break your streak if you are winning too much.
I used to be pretty good at the WWTBAM pub machine. I am a pretty quick reader so could scan read and answer the question pretty much instantly if I knew it, managed to impress a few onlookers that way (slow readers no doubt) as it seemed almost supernatural to them. My one taste of what it would feel like to be a top sports person!
This reminds me of a regular pub quiz I used to do - the guy hosting would pull out all sorts of these stupid numeric questions like "what's the distance between <tube station A> and <tube station B>?", and no point unless you got the answer exactly, ie to the nearest integer.
Another time the answer to a question was "West Ham" (the soi-disant football team), and I said to my pals "write down West Ham United, as this guy doesn't know anything about football and will surely insist upon it" ... and so it proved, despite howls of protest from other quizzers.
