2018 ACF Regs Specific Questions and Errors

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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by Auroni »

Was folding at home the middle part of the bonus?
I’d be curious to know how many people got that because of these forums and not actually knowing it.
Yes. That confounding effect seems hard to tease out, but it was well-known before the forums thread and is well known now.
kitakule wrote:Could I see the Wallace Stevens and A Christmas Carol tossups?
In a poem by this author, “the darkened ghosts of our old comedy” march with lanterns in “the tomb of heaven.” This poet wrote that “the wise man avenges” a fallen autumn leaf by “building his city in snow,” at the end of a poem whose racist title likens its fifty constituent vignettes to “decorations… in a cemetery.” In another poem, this author wrote that, although she “strews the leaves / Of sure obliteration on our paths,” “Death is the mother of beauty.” Helen Vendler posited that a funeral wake is the setting of this author’s poem in which a woman’s “horny feet protrude” to “show how cold she is, and dumb.” That poem by this author indirectly requests “the muscular one” to “whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds,” and begins: “Call the roller of big cigars.” For 10 points, name this poet of “Sunday Morning” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
ANSWER: Wallace Stevens (The first two poems are “On Heaven Considered as a Tomb” and “Like Decorations in a Chancellor of the Exchequer Cemetery.”)
<Non-Epic Poetry>

A character in this novella accuses another of being a “blot of mustard” or a “fragment of underdone potato” before threatening to swallow a toothpick. At the end of this novella, that character is described as practicing the “Total Abstinence Principle,” and earlier witnesses Mrs. Dilber and Joe divide a bounty of teaspoons, boots, and “bed-curtains.” In this novella, a giant wearing a green robe and a rusty scabbard without a sword describes a vision of a “vacant seat” and a “crutch without an owner.” Its protagonist is asked “are there no prisons?” and “are there no workhouses?” while being shown two children named Ignorance and Want in this novella’s third “stave.” At the end of this novella, the protagonist sends a prized turkey to the family of his employee Bob Cratchit and becomes a “second father” to Tiny Tim. For 10 points, name this Charles Dickens novella about Ebenezer Scrooge.
ANSWER: A Christmas Carol
<Short Fiction>
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by Sam »

I may be misremembering but I think the question on "money supply" mentioned some clues on deriving the demand function for money, which is a little confusing.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by CPiGuy »

Can I see the tossup on "counting"? I only got to hear the first couple lines (it was during our bye round and was buzzed on quickly). But, I really enjoyed seeing new and original linguistics content come up.

also, can I see the tossup on "indices"?
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by t-bar »

CPiGuy wrote:Can I see the tossup on "counting"? I only got to hear the first couple lines (it was during our bye round and was buzzed on quickly). But, I really enjoyed seeing new and original linguistics content come up.

also, can I see the tossup on "indices"?
Michigan A + Berkeley B + MIT A wrote:The ability to vocalize this action is heavily limited within the Pama–Nyungan language family. Children have implicit knowledge of how to do this action, according to the “principles before skill” argument advanced by Rochel Gelman. E. L. Kaufman analyzed how this action could be performed quickly in certain situations through a process of “subitizing” (“SUB-it-tye-zing”). In a 1999 experiment by Simons and Chabris (“shuh-BREE”), participants were told to perform this action while watching a video of white and black-shirted people passing around a basketball, causing most to miss the entrance of a person in a gorilla suit. Jean Piaget claimed that due to a lack of “reversibility,” young children performing this action struggle equally with cardinality and ordinality. For 10 points, name this skill needed to determine the number of objects in a set.
ANSWER: counting [accept counting the number of sheep or counting the number of passes]
Waterloo A + WUSTL A + Yale B wrote:In Nielsen theory, this quantity is the multiplicity of the zero of the function “f-of-z minus z” at a fixed point of f. For a linear operator, a quantity given this name equals the dimension of the kernel minus the dimension of the cokernel. The signature of a quadratic form is the difference between the positive and negative types of this quantity, which count the number of the form’s positive and negative eigenvalues. In group theory, the number of left cosets of a subgroup H with respect to a group G is given this name. Another type of these things is repeated to indicate implicit summation in the Einstein convention. The manipulation of tensors often involves “gymnastics” named for these things, in which they are raised, lowered, and contracted. For 10 points, name this variable that denotes a position in an ordered list, such as the i in the expression “x-sub-i.”
ANSWER: index [or indices; accept fixed-point index or index of inertia]
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

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Michigan A + Berkeley B + MIT A wrote:The ability to vocalize this action is heavily limited within the Pama–Nyungan language family. Children have implicit knowledge of how to do this action, according to the “principles before skill” argument advanced by Rochel Gelman. E. L. Kaufman analyzed how this action could be performed quickly in certain situations through a process of “subitizing” (“SUB-it-tye-zing”). In a 1999 experiment by Simons and Chabris (“shuh-BREE”), participants were told to perform this action while watching a video of white and black-shirted people passing around a basketball, causing most to miss the entrance of a person in a gorilla suit. Jean Piaget claimed that due to a lack of “reversibility,” young children performing this action struggle equally with cardinality and ordinality. For 10 points, name this skill needed to determine the number of objects in a set.
ANSWER: counting [accept counting the number of sheep or counting the number of passes]
I loved this tossup, as I did much of the social science in this set. It's a wonderful blend of very real and important clues drawn from linguistics and developmental psychology. It too was played during my bye round but I was delighted to hear it.

I have two relatively minor nitpicks about this particular question, which is otherwise fantastic:
- Counting in psychology typically refers to a particular type of number perception, where one goes through a set sequentially and individually, while keeping track of the number of items gone through (eg one dot, two dots, three dots, ok there are three dots). Subitizing, the automatic perception of a set's numerosity, is a interesting phenomenon precisely because it doesn't involve counting! The set's oneness, twoness, or threeness (subitizing has a limit of 3 or 4) immediately jumps out at you without having to individually step through items. So, subitizing is one way in which we process number, but it notably does not involve rapid counting. Perhaps the wording of the clue could be adjusted (eg "subitizing does not involve this action"), or the tossup could be reframed as a tossup on "number".
- At game speed, it can be difficult to notice that the selective attention study clue is asking about the cover task (counting passes), rather than the true and more notable purpose of the study (selective attention away from the gorilla). Perhaps if this clue were framed as "this action was the cover task that participants were asked to engage in..." negs of "attention" could be avoided.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by Ciorwrong »

Can I see math bonus whose the last part mentioned something about 3(mod7) and 5(mod7) or similar? I believe the answerline was _inverse_ but I had trouble parsing what was going on.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

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Progcon wrote:Can I see math bonus whose the last part mentioned something about 3(mod7) and 5(mod7) or similar? I believe the answerline was _inverse_ but I had trouble parsing what was going on.
Northwestern A + Maryland B + Oklahoma A wrote:Identify the following steps one takes while encoding a message with the RSA algorithm, for 10 points each.
[10] First, one chooses two very large numbers p and q of this type. Algorithms for identifying numbers of this type include the Miller–Rabin test and the sieve of Eratosthenes (“air-uh-TOSS-thuh-neez”).
ANSWER: prime numbers
[10] The next step is to select two integers n and e, where n equals “p times q” and e is coprime to the Euler totient (“OY-ler TOE-shint”) of n. Together, n and e constitute this portion of the RSA system, which can be widely disseminated.
ANSWER: public key [prompt on key]
[10] Finally, for the private key one selects an integer d that has this relation to e modulo the totient of n. 3 and 5 have this multiplicative relationship modulo 7.
ANSWER: multiplicative inverses
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by tempohouse1729 »

Northwestern A + Maryland B + Oklahoma A wrote: [10] Finally, for the private key one selects an integer d that has this relation to e modulo the totient of n. 3 and 5 have this multiplicative relationship modulo 7.
ANSWER: multiplicative inverses
Probably a small point here, but shouldn't something along the lines of "the product is congruent to 1 mod 7" be given as an "also accept" for this question? I gave that as my answer and was rejected until it was pointed out that that's the literal definition of a multiplicative inverse.
Last edited by tempohouse1729 on Sun Jan 28, 2018 1:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by t-bar »

tempohouse1729 wrote:
Northwestern A + Maryland B + Oklahoma A wrote: [10] Finally, for the private key one selects an integer d that has this relation to e modulo the totient of n. 3 and 5 have this multiplicative relationship modulo 7.
ANSWER: multiplicative inverses
Probably a small point here, but shouldn't something along the lines of "the product is congruent to 1 mod 7" be given as an "also accept" for this question? I gave that as an answer initially and was rejected until it was pointed out that that's the literal definition of a multiplicative inverse.
Yes, and I accepted this answer when I read this question at my site. You're right that this should probably be explicitly added to the answerline.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by tempohouse1729 »

t-bar wrote:
tempohouse1729 wrote:
Northwestern A + Maryland B + Oklahoma A wrote: [10] Finally, for the private key one selects an integer d that has this relation to e modulo the totient of n. 3 and 5 have this multiplicative relationship modulo 7.
ANSWER: multiplicative inverses
Probably a small point here, but shouldn't something along the lines of "the product is congruent to 1 mod 7" be given as an "also accept" for this question? I gave that as my answer and was rejected until it was pointed out that that's the literal definition of a multiplicative inverse.
Yes, and I accepted this answer when I read this question at my site. You're right that this should probably be explicitly added to the answerline.
Fair enough, thanks for your reply.

Also, if anyone could post up the Kubrick tossup, that would be lovely. It was got on the first line when I played it, and I'd be interested to see what the rest of the clues were for it.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

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tempohouse1729 wrote:Also, if anyone could post up the Kubrick tossup, that would be lovely. It was got on the first line when I played it, and I'd be interested to see what the rest of the clues were for it.
JHU A + Oxford A + UNC L wrote:In one of this director’s films, a Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy is played backwards during a scene in which nude women arrive one by one, curtsy in front of a figure holding a censer, and kneel in a circle. In a scene by this director, the William Tell Overture accompanies a three-minute timelapse of the protagonist having a threesome. The main theme of one of this director’s films is an arrangement of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary for the Moog synthesizer by Wendy Carlos. The Blue Danube plays during a space station docking sequence in one of this director’s films, whose opening popularized Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For 10 points, name this director of Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
ANSWER: Stanley Kubrick
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

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Ki67 labelling - not just for tumors.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

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Sima Guang Hater wrote:Ki67 labelling - not just for tumors.
Doing reverse clue-lookups on both PubMed and Google Scholar yields pages upon pages of papers on which a Ki67 labeling index was calculated for various cancers, so even if you're technically right, I'm at a loss to understand how you could have been misled.
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Re: Specific Questions and Errors

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I would like to acknowledge an error - the Ogaden War clue in my USSR/China tossup needed to be more specific to rule out an answer of "USSR and USA." To be clear, I thought this wouldn't be an issue because I was pretty sure the first clue would rule that out for most players ("an alliance cemented by handing over a railway town" - that is probably not gonna be two countries that dislike and do not border each other) but neg data indicate I was mistaken.
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