VCU Open 2014 discussion

[Matt Weiner]

Discussion of the main tournament.

Here is who wrote things.

Sinan Ulusoy- 92 questions, all science
Dan Puma- 62 questions, history and religion
Jordan Brownstein- 53 questions, literature and history
Shan Kothari- 114 questions, most of the arts and philosophy plus a few in other topics
Mike Bentley- 163 questions in various categories
Matt Weiner- 109 questions in various categories

[Jem Casey]

Since I might as well confess to my crimes, here's a list of the things I wrote for this tournament, in order of appearance:

Literature: Silence, Our Man in Havana, "Who killed Boy Staunton?" bonus, Iris Murdoch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lazarillo de Tormes bonus, "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", "Revelation", John Ford, Bruno Schulz bonus, Yeats writing about the Gregory family bonus (extra), Henry V, I Will Marry When I Want bonus, The Leopard, In Memoriam A.H.H., Isak Dinesen, Ben Jonson, Breakfast of Champions, Ghosts, Transtromer bonus, Dylan Thomas bonus, Ellen Olenska, Eugene Henderson (the Rain King), Christopher Okigbo, Czech Republic, Calvino bonus, the Tragedians, Pedro Camacho's radio serials, Private Lives

History: Northumbria, Restoration bonus, Portugal, Finland and Russia, Athens, Preparedness movement bonus, Isaurian Dynasty, impressment, William Randolph Hearst, Plowshares, conversion of Clovis, British fascism, Henry VI, fugitive slaves, Southern Bread Riots bonus, Ernest Bevin bonus, druids, Battle of Plataea bonus, Jefferson-Hemings controversy, Insane asylums, Septimius Severus

Any feedback is appreciated!

[Sima Guang Hater]

Can someone email copies of the set already? I've asked like 3 times now.

[Matt Weiner]

Can someone email copies of the set already? I've asked like 3 times now.

This is the first I've heard of it, and I'm the only person who has the full set. I've sent you a copy. As a general practice, though, people should not expect editors or TDs to send out sets that are still being mirrored; that era of security naivete ended on March 20, 2013. I know you and your understanding of security practices; this may not be, and in fact almost certainly is not, the case for any arbitrary TD-player pairing.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

All right, well, I'll start this discussion if nobody else will. It was pretty disappointing to arrive in the morning and see the editing team planning how they were going to finish the tournament. Even though the set wasn't disastrously bad or anything, it seemed kinda phoned-in pretty often. Some tossups, such as the Nineveh question, started out with lead-ins that would stand out as too easy at a high school national. Hard parts to bonuses varied from ACF Regionals to "this other Ishmael Bea novel." Even though individual questions were often enjoyable - Dickens was pretty fun, among others - it didn't feel like the set had really been edited. The good qualities spoke to what the set could have been if it had been completed on time.

[Matt Weiner]

I mean, you're welcome to have your opinions on the set, but to be clear, the "planning how we were going to finish the tournament" consisted of writing 10 questions that were still open in the set for various reasons. As I mentioned in the other post, this didn't actually delay anything. The 10 questions were a bunch of Other Religion and a few lit bonuses, none of which were the questions anyone mentioned as disliking.

[DumbJaques]

Eh, some of the other religion questions certainly were not super (Bhakti was reportedly four lines long and sounded pretty not-good when playing). But I think Bollinger is making the larger point that a reasonable portion of the set had a bit of a rushed feeling; he's right that bonuses varied WIDELY (and I say this as someone who subscribes to the doctrine that you don't need to and can't be perfect on this front). I think we were playing the Magin-Jackson team with two tossups to go, and both teams joked that we'd split the questions but the winner would be the team who got the answerable bonus. This indicates some roughness around the edges, I'd say.

I didn't think this set was bad or anything, but it could have been tighter. The order of finish seemed about right, and the number of clunkers was higher than ideal but not truly a problem (Matt's right that some of the leadins were randomly really easy, though). The reality is though that even when finishing at the deadline doesn't really alter things all that much (vs., say, finishing an hour before everyone shows up), it's going to color perceptions. I can't say definitively there was a link between the set roughness and the 11th hour work, but as someone who's been in that situation myself that's generally the way it goes. You can't be up against the clock with 10 tossups still unwritten as round 1 begins and have had the time to carefully edit the whole rest of the set. Let's be real, we all understand how this works - compromises get made. A bad tossup on Bhakti is better than ending the game on tossup 19.

We'll probably be able to have a more productive conversation when we can see the set, though; influenced by recent threads, I find myself reluctant to make too many pronouncements without reading through the packets. At any rate, thanks to the editors for their work, and I enjoyed playing despite the drawbacks.

[Sam]

Especially in the earlier rounds, some of the subdistributions seemed a little uneven. A few had all "other science" astronomy or earth science, or history questions from the same region. I don't think it affected the outcome of any games, but it was the sort of thing that could have been easily fixed if the tournament had been compiled earlier.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Yeah, this set served its role fine by providing a day of decent questions on which to have a day's worth of unserious, high-difficulty quizbowl fun. It wasn't super-polished, and sure there was a clunker here or there, and a smattering of really brutal bonuses, and sometimes a round would have 1/1 photography or whatever, and it's great if future events take a little more care with stuff like this, but nothing really marred the experience of a summer tournament that didn't have to be perfect to be worth attending.

[Mike Bentley]

Since this set is being mirrored later, if there's any errata that can be fixed between now and then I'd appreciate that being posted here or sent to me.

[Mnemosyne]

Since this set is being mirrored later, if there's any errata that can be fixed between now and then I'd appreciate that being posted here or sent to me.

Out of the 7 rounds I saw, I know one round had 2/2 myth (Oisin and Amphitryon), one had 2/1 myth (Gjall and mares of Diomedes), and it seemed like 2 or 3 had 0 myth tossups. I don't have the packets or the round numbers since we played them out of order, so I can't give any exact details. I assume these were mistakes and not intentional. There were also a good number of typos throughout the set that I don't have marked or anything.

[DumbJaques]

Someone made a comment that (if I heard correctly) the set was simply randomly sorted rather than having tiebreakers placed deliberately, so sometimes a round would not have a physics tossup (since it would be like tossup 21, and the replacement science would be in the main 20). So, heads up just in case = I have no idea if this was really a problem; frankly, I'm not sure how anyone could consider not hearing a physics tossup a problem, but the quizbowl community always finds ways to surprise me.

[Mike Bentley]

Someone made a comment that (if I heard correctly) the set was simply randomly sorted rather than having tiebreakers placed deliberately, so sometimes a round would not have a physics tossup (since it would be like tossup 21, and the replacement science would be in the main 20). So, heads up just in case = I have no idea if this was really a problem; frankly, I'm not sure how anyone could consider not hearing a physics tossup a problem, but the quizbowl community always finds ways to surprise me.

Hrmm, it's possible this is the case. QEMS is set to have 21 tossups per round for this set. Not sure if this is an intentional QEMS workaround or not.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Frankly, I'm not sure how anyone could consider not hearing a physics tossup a problem

Heh, that's not what you thought at ACF Nats 2012!

[Mike Bentley]

Perhaps to generate some discussion, I'll list the questions I wrote outside of my usual categories of history/art/CS/geo/trash. I ended up writing a decent amount of lit for this, I'd be curious to have some idea of how that was received.

Lit: Frank O'Hara, Joel Barlow, The White Album, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, James Dickey, the Chosen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sunflower Sutra, Counterparts, Prisoner of Zenda, James Hogg, Roderick Ranndom, The Judgment, Sholom Aleichem, Alyosha the Pot, The Bet, Trojan Women, Aravind Adiga

Ashbery / Collins / Ammons, Great Stone Face / Rappaccini's Daugther / tarred and feathred, Huck Finn / Ezra Pound / Sanctuary, Going After Cacciato / Things They Carried / telling stories, Cosmpolis / Don Delillo / bodyguards, Original of Laura / Nabokov / Mademoiselle O, Telegraph Avenue / Chabon / football player, Zadie Smith / Howards End / Mangal Pande, Unamuno / Madness of Dr. Montarco / Don Quixote, Perrault / Boileau-Despreaux / Swift, Montale / Lowell / mouse, Sganarelle / Moliere / Bourgeois Gentleman, Zweig / Mann / Amok, Ismael Beah / child soldier / Radiance of Tomorrow, Yam Gruel / Akutagawa / Yoshihide, Skating Rink / Bolano / Archimboldi

Music: Les Paul, Harold Arlen (yuck this one was a pretty last minute question), Thomson / Stein / Boulanger, Mahler / 9th Symphony / Salome

RMP: Amphitryon, St. Francis of Assisi, Philippians, Thomas Nagel, Lares / crossroads / Genius, Annunciation / Gabriel / Dionysius Exiguus, kapus / Hawaii / kahunas

SS: Uncanny Valley, Lost Letter experiment, police interrogations, Mischel / marshmallows / Pinker (d'oh, I had a note to make this harder and forgot to do so--this was clearly one of those 'ACF Regionals bonuses' in the set), Burnham / Pareto / Welch

Misc: William S. Burroughs

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Minor: It might be worth checking to see if the clue using the word naufragium could be made a bit more specific to chariot races; as far as I know that word literally means "shipwreck," though I guess it can refer to vehicular crashes in general.

[Victor Prieto]

So, I don't really know anything about math, but people seemed to be annoyed that Lie algebra required both words when multiple times earlier in the question, the words "Lie group" were used.

I'm confused as to why my protest on the carboxylic acids question was accepted, actually. My protest was based on the fact that I heard "in NMR, these compounds have a shift of 12 to 13 ppm," which caused me to rule out carboxylic acids since I knew they were highly variable and can't be tied down to one region of the spectrum. It was a bad clue, but it was read after three lines of tossup, so we figured it didn't matter (and then confusingly shook hands with Chicago despite that the game was apparently unfinished). We were then told to remain in the room, and after we played the next round, Chicago came back in and we played a replacement. I'm not at all mad about this, I'm just very confused. Can someone explain what happened behind the scenes, please?

Also, can I see the chemistry tossup on nickel and bonus on TLC?

[Matt Weiner]

I can't speak to why people were making up their own protest procedures, but when the substance of that protest finally made it to me, I did some research and found that the clue was simply wrong, and the rules say to play a replacement question when that happens. An outright incorrect clue is not the same thing as a "Rhode Island protest" where a clue is ambiguous but other clues in the question point to only one of the possible answers.

[Gonzagapuma1]

Minor: It might be worth checking to see if the clue using the word naufragium could be made a bit more specific to chariot races; as far as I know that word literally means "shipwreck," though I guess it can refer to vehicular crashes in general.

Thanks for pointing this out. I changed this to say "It doesn't involve ships, but".

[Sima Guang Hater]

frankly, I'm not sure how anyone could consider not hearing a physics tossup a problem, but the quizbowl community always finds ways to surprise me.

How long have we known each other?

[Sam]

I can't speak to why people were making up their own protest procedures,.

To clarify, we were scheduled to play the next game in the same room, which we did without any delay. At the end of that game Cody told us to stay put because he was about to read a new tossup to Chicago and us, not to quarantine us until the protest was decided. I don't think it slowed things down any more than however much time was necessary to hear the tossup.

In the same packet, there was a bonus part that referred to the axiom of choice as a theorem. In the context of the bonus I think that was technically true, as there are three equivalent statements out of which you can arbitrarily decide which to take as axiomatic, but it was still pretty confusing. There were a couple of other questions with similar issues: the George Zimmerman tossup initially referred to him as an artist, which is cute but misleading.

I agree with Matt Jackson's overall assessment. VCU Open always has had a nice mix of deep tossups on well-tread territory (like lesser known Kafka stories) and tossups on things which maybe in the future people shouldn't write tossups on (like lesser known Thorstein Veblen essays) but are still fun to see play out.

[Gautam]

I mostly had fun. Thanks for all the writers' hard work.

The slightly higher than normal anatomy/physiology played out pretty well, thanks to Sinan for trying that out. I think we ended up tag-teaming to 20s on the shoulder joint bonus and the cornea bonus, which was fun. I also liked the that there was a TU on mechanism design.

There were some parts which left me a little confused... there seemed to be an ACF Fall level TU on Ampere's law in the same round as a tossup on something absurdly difficult for one of the remaining science TUs (maybe it was the Swern oxidation tossup?) As some others have noted, there were a number of really hard bonuses too. This happened often enough that it detracted a bit from the experience.

[Gautam]

So, I don't really know anything about math, but people seemed to be annoyed that Lie algebra required both words when multiple times earlier in the question, the words "Lie group" were used.

Yeah, I figured out this was asking about Lie algebras by the end, but couldn't muster the courage to buzz in because of all the Lie mentions in the TU. I think this could be repronouned to be just on Sophus Lie and would be a serviceable TU.