General Discussion

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ThisIsMyUsername
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General Discussion

Post by ThisIsMyUsername »

I think I speak for all my co-editors when I say that I sincerely hope that you enjoyed our tournament.

First, the long list of people I need to thank. My hearty thanks to my co-editors on this set: Gautam Kandlikar, Matt Menard, Marshall Steinbaum, and Seth Teitler. Further thanks go to the writers: Will Alston, Sam Bailey, Michael Coates, Joey Goldman, Doug Graebner, Nick Jensen, Connie Prater, and Max Schindler. Of these writers, I would like to single out the Dartmouth folks for additional praise: people keep talking about this tournament as a "Chicago tournament", but Will and Nick combined wrote 32% of this set, and they were easily among the most dedicated writers I have ever worked with on any quizbowl project, prompt in their writing, and fastidious in their cluing. An additional thanks to Marshall and Max for joining in me in performing a (literally) 16-hour proofreading and packetization job yesterday. Finally, I need to think my playtesters: Susan Ferrari, Auroni Gupta, Saul Hankin, Selene Koo, Tanay Kothari, Jonathan Magin, Itamar Naveh-Benjamin, Sinan Ulusoy, Cody Voight, and Matt Weiner (I hope I haven't forgotten any of you).

A word on the editing/writing structure of this tournament: This was my first time serving as head-editor for a collegiate tournament, rather than merely as a subject editor, but I did so in a way that granted the individual subject editors a lot of autonomy content-wise, even if I was the one cracking the whip logistics-wise. The editors were responsible for sub-distributing their categories; the questions for those categories were then written by the assigned writers. In the case of the Bio + Chem and the Physics, Gautam and Seth served as editors for those categories, but they did not write those questions themselves. Rather, Nick Jensen wrote all of the Bio + Chem under Gautam's supervision, and Max wrote all of the Physics under Seth's supervision. Likewise, Marshall wrote all of the Earth Science and Astronomy under Seth, who also edited the Mythology (written by Max, Nick, and Doug). Matt Menard edited the Math and CS (which was written in collaboration with Max), and co-edited the Religion (written by Doug, Will, and Nick) together with me. Marshall edited the History (which he co-wrote with Will, Nick, and Coates) and Social Science (which he co-wrote with Sam and myself). I wrote and edited the Auditory Arts, and edited the Visual Arts (which I co-wrote with Doug), the Literature (which I co-wrote with Nick, Connie, Max, and Joey), and the Philosophy (which I co-wrote with Sam). Michael Coates wrote all the Current Events, which was edited by Marshall.

This thread will be for general discussion of the set. Marshall and I will start separate threads for discussion of questions in individual subjects and one for errata.
John Lawrence
Yale University '12
King's College London '13
University of Chicago '20

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton
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Excelsior (smack)
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Excelsior (smack) »

Absent a thread for physics or other science, I will post about those things here instead. (Go ahead and migrate this to a topic-specific thread if somebody makes one.)

I felt that the physics was all around decent in this tournament. There were some rather good questions - position, magnetic flux (albeit the first clue was utterly unparseable), the "1/6" bonus part; some clunkers - Wien (who cares about Wien's incorrect version of the mass-energy relation? Certainly not me!); "negative three" (I don't exactly remember what happened in this one, but I recall not being a fan of it); and the rest was somewhere in the middle. I felt that the physics bonuses were on the whole significantly easier than all other types of bonuses at this tournament - I think we were doing better on physics bonuses here than at most regular-difficulty tournaments this year (whereas our bonus conversion seemed lower for most other categories, as one would expect from a hard tournament).

The computer science was a very mixed bag. Very good questions: matrix mult / "7" / Omega(n^2), class / singleton / MVC (and the bonus with union bounds was also pretty good, though I don't know if you counted that as CS); not so good questions: the tossups on dynamic programming and "relational". The Levenshtein edit distance algorithm is one of the most canonical and most well-known applications of dynamic programming due to its simplicity and ubiquity, and should probably not be a lead-in (and I think that tossups on dynamic programming are generally fated to not be all that great, besides). Writing a question on the word "relational" is probably not ever a good idea, and in any case, the clues are poorly ordered - the leadin mentions things like "views" and "integrity constraints" which are straightforward and important features of any relational database system, and from there proceeds to talk about the relational algebra, which I'm positive is not as well-known. I don't really know enough about pipelining to know if that question was well-structured, but it was a very interesting idea for a tossup, if perhaps a smidge on the hard side.

The rest of the other science was pretty good. Brief thoughts:
-The math was good. The first few lines of the tossup on "convex" were particularly interesting and treaded territory that is not often treaded by math questions.
-The astronomy was quite solid - which is no surprise from a Seth-edited tournament, but my compliments to Marshall as well. The tossups on big bang nucleosynthesis, molecular clouds, and population III stars were splendid.
-The earth science was also quite pleasant. The tossup on the Cambrian was about as good as any tossup on a period can be, and had lots of interesting clues that I wish I had known. Judging from Nick's post, the "forest fire" tossup also was in this category, and that was also very interesting.
Ashvin Srivatsa
Corporate drone '?? | Yale University '14 | Sycamore High School (OH) '10
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Re: General Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

I really enjoyed this set. I have specific comments that I'll confine to the relevant threads, but in general I thought this was a really good tournament.
Jerry Vinokurov
ex-LJHS, ex-Berkeley, ex-Brown, sorta-ex-CMU
presently: John Jay College Economics
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theMoMA
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Re: General Discussion

Post by theMoMA »

I'll echo Jerry. This tournament was very well done and a lot of fun to play. I particularly enjoyed the mix of tossup answer lines; they ranged from easy to hard, and from straightforward to creative, without losing a consistent feel in terms of difficulty. I also enjoyed the attempts in the social science and philosophy to use concrete conceptual clues with straightforward answer lines to test on "real" things without frustrating the player with vague or confusing answers. Thanks to all the writers and editors for their contributions, and to John for bringing everything together.
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Re: General Discussion

Post by jonah »

I just had a friend read Brad Fischer and me the math, CS, mixed science referencing math or CS, Judaism, mixed religion referencing Judaism, and ancient Greek history questions, plus assorted others he found interesting or thought we'd find interesting. I really enjoyed it, so thanks to the writers and editors.

What was the Common Core/NCTM/Gates foundation bonus categorized as?


Of course, this is a post on HSQB, so I'm going to nitpick a couple of things:

In the OOP bonus (packet 8), I think the phrase "the instantiation of a particular class is limited to one object" is kind of confusing; that made me think of the factory pattern (until I heard the second sentence). Something like "only one instance of a class may exist" would be better.

In the lobotomy tossup (packet 10), it struck me as very surprising that "transorbital" was in power.

Regarding the tossup on whales in myth (packet 10), I realize the question says "mammals", but the giveaway really bugs me. According to Jonah 2:1, Jonah was swallowed by a "dag gadol"; there is no way to translate that other than "big fish" (or "great fish" or other phrases that include "fish" and the notion of largeness). The word for "whale" is "livyatan". It is not correct to say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale.

I see that this has been previously discussed, but I agree with the criticisms of the dynamic programming tossup (packet 11); the clues do not seem to be arranged pyramidally, and the giveaway isn't very helpful.

Despite these, I repeat that this was awesome.
Jonah Greenthal
National Academic Quiz Tournaments
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

jonah wrote:What was the Common Core/NCTM/Gates foundation bonus categorized as?
Modern World
jonah wrote:Regarding the tossup on whales in myth (packet 10), I realize the question says "mammals", but the giveaway really bugs me. According to Jonah 2:1, Jonah was swallowed by a "dag gadol"; there is no way to translate that other than "big fish" (or "great fish" or other phrases that include "fish" and the notion of largeness). The word for "whale" is "livyatan". It is not correct to say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale.
I realize for various reasons you may consider yourself an authority about what "really happened" to Jonah, and specifically which phylum the creature that swallowed him and retained him in a sentient state in its digestive tract at length, such that he was able to hear and correspond with God and eventually be regurgitated on land at God's request, belonged to, but according to the alternative account of Jonah I just pulled out of my ass, he was swallowed by a Right Whale.

UPDATE (3/15/2014): I of course didn't even need the new account I pulled out of my ass, when I had Sportin' Life's re-telling in "It Ain't Necessarily So:"
Sportin' Life wrote:Old Jonah, he lived in a whale
for he made his home
in that fish's abdomen..."
So the sources obviously are internally inconsistent, and plus, this is "culturally significant."
Marshall I. Steinbaum

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University of Chicago (2008-2014)
University of Utah (2019- )

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Re: General Discussion

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

I guess I'll just say here, given what else may or may not be going on in other tournament discussion subfora, that the innovation of specifying "With his/her alphabetically-prior collaborator" rather than just "With a colleague" was ingenious and I hope it becomes common practice.
Matt Jackson
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Cody
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Cody »

RyuAqua wrote:I guess I'll just say here, given what else may or may not be going on in other tournament discussion subfora, that the innovation of specifying "With his/her alphabetically-prior collaborator" rather than just "With a colleague" was ingenious and I hope it becomes common practice.
me, MO 2012 wrote:A collaborator and this man, who is second alphabetically, proved that the zeros of the partition function of ferromagnetic Ising models always lie on the unit circle.
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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Sam
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Sam »

Renesmee LaHotdog Voight wrote:
RyuAqua wrote:I guess I'll just say here, given what else may or may not be going on in other tournament discussion subfora, that the innovation of specifying "With his/her alphabetically-prior collaborator" rather than just "With a colleague" was ingenious and I hope it becomes common practice.
me, MO 2012 wrote:A collaborator and this man, who is second alphabetically, proved that the zeros of the partition function of ferromagnetic Ising models always lie on the unit circle.
Right, I remembered liking Cody's method in MO 2012 and self-consciously stole it for a question in this tournament. I think there was another question whose author did this independently of me, I'm not sure what his or her inspiration was.
Sam Bailey
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Re: General Discussion

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

Sam wrote:
Renesmee LaHotdog Voight wrote:
RyuAqua wrote:I guess I'll just say here, given what else may or may not be going on in other tournament discussion subfora, that the innovation of specifying "With his/her alphabetically-prior collaborator" rather than just "With a colleague" was ingenious and I hope it becomes common practice.
me, MO 2012 wrote:A collaborator and this man, who is second alphabetically, proved that the zeros of the partition function of ferromagnetic Ising models always lie on the unit circle.
Right, I remembered liking Cody's method in MO 2012 and self-consciously stole it for a question in this tournament. I think there was another question whose author did this independently of me, I'm not sure what his or her inspiration was.
Spite
Marshall I. Steinbaum

Oxford University (2002-2005)
University of Chicago (2008-2014)
University of Utah (2019- )

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