The Quizbowl Resource Center

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If this sounds interesting, we're extending Online registration deadline to June 18, sign up if you'd like to see this in action!

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Congrats to Sara’s Crias who went 4-2 to win the tournament and win $150. “Kicking and Screaming” and “Inquizitive” both went 3-3, but “Inquizitive” had higher overall points for second place ($100). We’re not releasing AI results until after the virtual competition. Likewise, we’re not going to rele ...

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Update! We currently have four teams registered, so we will press on. While the deadline was yesterday, we're happy to take more players (either as free agents or as part of teams) on a space-available basis. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeer3WxOjkbrf4WEUaGNkVKpVW2ZuHhC9lwVNzfJft7dsrcgg ...

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We’re hosting a mini-tournament at the University of Maryland on Jun 14, 2025 (Online mirror June 17, 2025). The tournament is planned for the morning; if someone would like to run a side event in the afternoon, that would be fantastic! The tl;dr is that we’re going to play quiz bowl (tossups and bon ...

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Some details on prizes:

The top team at each mirror will receive $150
second place will receive $100
and third place $50

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We're running a summer research experience at UMD, and while all of our paid slots have filled up, some people have asked if they can still participate. https://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/reucaar/projects24.html Some of the things are very quiz bowl related, others not so much: https://docs.google.com ...

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In 2018, we had a human-computer adversarial tournament: https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/past-events/dec-15-2018?authuser=0 Where people wrote questions that were hard for computers but relatively easy for humans. Computers have gotten a lot better since then, and we’d like to do it again. ...

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As part of our Natural Language Processing course at the University of Maryland, we've put together human vs. computer question answering competitions as part of the final for our course. You can check out some of those here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH8cUGFOwPk https://www.youtube.com/watch ...

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Thanks you for your participation!

We are happy to announce that we are offering an additional prize! The player who won the most score in the last 72 hours (from June 11th to 13th) will get $25. This prize is independent of other prizes, as well as your current score. Try to overtake the winner!

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The one appearance from Colorado that I know of was a much earlier transplant from back east who still wanted to play (only one year on a one-man team). Not true! Here's the NAQT stat page: https://www.naqt.com/stats/school/results.jsp?org_id=65254 They also went to several non-NAQT events. I ...

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I’m an AI researcher (and former quizbowler) who builds computers that can answer questions. You can watch some of our previous human—computer trivia competitions here: https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/past-events This year, we're doing something different. We're running a competition to see how w ...

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We now have enough people to test the system out, thanks for all who signed up, thanks!

If you're still interested, we'll probably do this again once we incorporate everything we've learned from this round.

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Update from e-mailed questions: Target difficulty is HSNCT / PACE NSC.

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Tl;dr: We’re looking for some people to write ten quiz bowl questions next week for $100 and give us feedback on a question writing interface. I’m a professor who uses trivia as a way to improve how computers answer questions. I also use question answering in my classes about natural language pro ...

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Please sign up by Thursday noon (Eastern time) if you'd like to play!

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Human-AI Cooperative Spring Novice Hello everyone! We are happy to announce a human-AI cooperative Spring Novice tournament hosted virtually by University of Maryland on Saturday, May 15th (we realize this conflicts with History Bowl, but given research paper deadlines, this is the only date that ...

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Mods: feel free to delete or move ... I've never seen a post like this on the board before, but I'm probably the only person who'd make such a post.

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If you have a bachelors degree or a masters degree and are looking to do a PhD, I'm looking for a PhD student who is interested in the relationship between the trivia community and the machine learning community to look at questions like "how does preventing cheating in online quiz bowl tournaments ...

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From a machine learning perspective, it would make quiz bowl much more valuable as a training set (e.g., to see how a journal article gets rewritten as a question and to check whether IR systems are finding the right sources). If anybody wanted to try doing this for a tournament, we could probably ...

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Bumping this, as we now have information on prizes. Up to $500 in prizes are available, and only requires two nights!

25 Sep: sign up
Oct: Prelim
11 Dec: Final

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You may know us for building QANTA, the quizbowl AI system (and side projects for playing QB online, writing questions free of stock clues, etc.). We’re building on our previous systems to not just have computers play trivia games but to help humans play trivia games better. To do this, we’re int ...

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I meant to respond to this earlier, but got sidetracked with the start of the semester. For pronunciation help, I think that there are more straightforward thing that could be done with existing tools ( embarrassing project I did along these lines a long time ago ). For question generation, I think ...

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This will be questions in the style of Natural Questions, indeed, rather than normal quiz bowl questions. But because the quality of questions is non-uniform, we'll make sure that the questions we select are interesting and of the sort that quiz bowlers would appreciate (e.g., more like interesting ...

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A few years ago, we hosted a competition between human and machine teams, and we're looking to do it again this year (with support from Google). This Medium posts explains the competition a little bit more than the official announcement (which is linked): https://medium.com/@alexmoltzau/a-google ...

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I think the "play-along" aspect of Finals is something that a) is fun and participatory from afar and b) has been very hard to capture outside of a live setting. I'm talkin' bout when the whole audience is whispering to each other before, after, and during the buzzes. ("would you have gotten that ...

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The were used on QBlitz, but now that's over we should be posting packets. The JSON versions are coming soon, but in the meantime, we have Google Docs for the impatient. http://trickme.qanta.org Videos / press release are hopefully coming in the next couple of weeks along with our publication ...

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We have space at UMD. We have offered to discuss using our TV studios. I have yet to get an answer. I suspect this is just a ploy to get more sponsorship dollars (see their latest social media posts).

That said, if anybody know anybody competent there and can get me in touch with them ...

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Sorry for the delay. My first priority was getting checks out to people, and we have mostly complete stats here: http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/qb/2018_QANTA/2018_qanta_games.html I know there is one missing game of Monticello vs. Technical Wizards, which I'll have to recreate from the video ...

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Congrats to the teams that competed in our tournament today! Computer Division: FYY High School: Monticello College: Maryland A Open: Rage Against the Machine Full prize information, stats, and videos after I get grades in. In the meantime, please don't discuss questions as we're going to have an ...

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Please join us at the University of Maryland for our first Human-Computer Question Answering competition. Our event will be in the Language Science Center: https://languagescience.umd.edu/about/directions Please come to HJP 2130 between 8:15 and 8:45 for registration and some breakfast foods. We’ll h ...

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We just got some new interest from some high school teams ... we could expand the field if we just had one or two more teams.

No registration fee, no packet writing requirements ... just show up! (First come first served.)

If you're interested, sign up on http://qanta.org

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We've extended the deadline for registering for the computer half of the competition to November 28. We currently have 16 computer teams registered: * SFU NLP * Simplifai * ugrad * Studio OUSIA * Clever Name TBD * FYY-723 * 723 WT * Z - NLP * FFT * Iota * QaQa Land * Forward Thinking * CALEZH ...

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Two brief updates. The framework for computer teams to submit systems is now online: https://pinafore.github.io/qanta-leaderboard/ We're still accepting human registrations for the waiting list. If we get to 14 teams, we'll likely expand the field. Preference will be given to those writing questions.

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Here's a question about the write.qanta interface that I don't think I can figure out without going in and trying it: if I start writing a question, at what point is it submitted to the website? That is, if I start writing a question with the answer "John Doe", am I locked into having a John Doe ...

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Yes, that's right. It's probably not worth getting into details, but there are multiple signals that we can use to generate whether something has been asked about: Jeopardy!, other trivia questions online, etc. We don't think showing those questions are worth showing to quiz bowl writers, though ...

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While I understand the motivation to have answerlines that have come up before, but I'm a little confused by the situation. Is the write.qanta site supposed to restrict your answer to things that have Wikipedia articles and have been asked about in at least three archived questions? At the moment ...

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We're getting more great questions ... following the usual strategy of posting on the webpage and the message boards. Q: I can't find my favorite answer in the system. Why is this? This is a design decision that we made. These are the answer for which there have been three answers in mainstream quiz ...

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Had some good questions come through. Updated the webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/dec-15-2018 and also posting fuller answers here. Are the packets really going to be 50 tossups? Q: What's the format of the games? Why is it structured like that? We'll have 40 questions, tossups only. If ...

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No, we'll edit down to 40 + tiebreakers.

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Human field update: * Roger Bork TBA * Quizbowl: A "Bag of Nerds" Approach to Named Entity Recognition Sam Spaulding, Stephen Leh, Isaac Park * still working on a name Drew Scheeler + TBA * Maryland A Graham Reid, Caleb Kendrick, Weijia Cheng, Justin Hawkins * What to Do After You Hit Return Michael ...

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If we had the requisite data at a tossup level, we could do a pretty good job of estimating it:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05559

(And we could probably find something more interpretable than these MoE weights.)

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We had some complaints from people considering writing packets (without playing) that the payment for just writing a packet (50 TU) or half packet (25 TU) should be more than that of a team that also plays. We agree with that logic, and have upped the payment for half and full packets to $75 and ...

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Some questions that we've gotten on submitting questions, added to the FAQ on the webpage: Q: Can we blend subcategories/categories? Feel free to blend subcategories and categories. Our distribution requirements aren't super strict. But don't use blending to avoid writing about topics (e.g., "real ...

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We agree with the problematic name and have been in communication with the team, all future references to the team will use Robert Bork.

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Okay, 600 it is. I realize that people use Google Docs, but "lines" is arbitrary, and it's not just that questions need to be submitted on qanta.org, but if you want to do well in the question writing competition, you'll need to do your final editing there (e.g., to make sure that you haven't ...

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Aplogies for cross posting , but we've had a dearth of HS signups, and we'd really like more high school teams. We’re hosting a December 15 event that aims to match top human teams against computer algorithms in a fun competition. https://sites.google.com/view/qanta/dec-15-2018 Because this is a p ...

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Yes, we have optimized for HSNCT questions in the past, so that obviously guided my thinking. If there's a strong consensus for longer questions, I'm certainly open to that. How about 600? That's actually pretty long. (At the moment, however, the system will accept anything, so this is all open to ...

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Field Update (10/8/18): Maryland A [Redacted] Sam Spaulding, Stephen Leh, Isaac Park Drew Scheeler,... Michael Bentley, Jeremy Eaton, Sam Braunfeld Will Alston, Jordan Brownstein, Daniel Hothem At least one spot left for sure, but we'll take additional registrations for waitlist or possible field ...

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Is there a length guideline for submitted questions? Try not to go over 500 characters of questions, and unless the question is exquisitely crafted, try not to go under 400 characters. This is a really important point, thanks! We'll update the question submission interface to reflect this and also ...

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We're about a week away from our deadline for packet-writing teams (which is hopefully most teams), and we don't yet have enough teams to have a viable tournament. To help people matchmake, if you'd like to find a teammate or just want to write a packet for fun, please add your information here ...

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