

April 11, 1954: The Most Boring Day in the 20th Century

Computer scientist William Tunstall-Pedoe, developer of the search engine True Knowledge, has determined that April 11, 1954 was the most boring day of the 20th Century. His conclusion is based on an estimate of notable births, deaths, and events:

Every day something of significance happens, a person is born who is destined for fame, there is an event in the arts or sports, history is created. With 300 million of these facts fed into the “brain” of True Knowledge, Tunstall-Pedoe’s Cambridge company, the computer was asked: “What was the most boring day in the 20th century?”[...]

Nearly five million people are using True Knowledge every month, asking their own questions and contributing factoids and context to improve the quality of search.

Many of these facts include dates. The system has a unique understanding of the importance of the entities in the world which can be calculated as a number, such as events beginning and ending, births, deaths, wars, founding of businesses and the release of publications. So you can find out what happened on a particular day. For example, who was born on May 3, 1983?

“It occurred to us that we are able to objectively measure the importance of every day in history. Some days are highly eventful and on some days far less happens and we can also objectively estimate the importance of these events. via First Things | Photo by Flickr user Samuel Kreutz used under Creative Commons license

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The battle of Dien Bien Phu was going on--April 11th saw a lot of fighting.

That battle shaped U.S. and French history for the latter half of the 20th Century to a great extent.

I'd say that disqualifies the date from being 'boring'.
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Barack Obama's "Primary Occupation" is "Author"

His residence is NYC.

His employer is Public Allies.

His location is Flint, Michigan.

300,000,000 "facts" do not matter if the facts are incorrect and/or outdated.

Database rules apply...GIGO.
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Edward Oliver: the calculation was done offline with a separate bit of software and the fact that answers the question added manually later. It isn't done in real time hence the lack of reasoning when you ask the question.

Although the knowledge base is incomplete it does have fairly comprehensive knowledge about notable people, places and events and over 300 million facts so we stand by the calculation.

You can see the kinds of facts which contributed to the answer by asking questions like

what happened on 20 june 1976?

which should give you a feel for how unusually uneventful 11 April 1954 really was.
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