The Quizbowl Resource Center

ryanrosenberg

I'm excited to announce that Katherine Lei has joined the team as our science editor!

There's also still a couple of days left to apply to write for this set -- we've already gotten some applications from new writers, but there's still plenty of room, definitely apply if you're considering it!

ryanrosenberg

Tuesday is the deadline to apply! Please make sure to get your applications in by 11:59 Pacific time, or PM me here or email at [email protected] if you need some more time.

ryanrosenberg

Reminder that the deadline for this is in two weeks!

ryanrosenberg

I liked the in-game experience of Zoom + buzzer app more than Discord, although I agree with Mike that not having a good way of communicating rapidly with everyone detracted from the experience. A Zoom tournament utilizing a Discord server for communication might be the best way to go.

ryanrosenberg

John said everything I would've, except I haven't been to Andrić's house.

ryanrosenberg

We are looking for at least one host in the following regions: Northeast (NY, CT, VT, NH, RI, MA, ME) Mid-Atlantic (NJ, PA, DE, MD, DC, VA) South (NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, TN, KY, LA, TX) Great Lakes (MI, OH, IN) Midwest (IL, WI) Great Plains and Rockies (MN, IA, MO, OK, TX, CO, UT, MT, ID, AZ) West...

ryanrosenberg

I am pleased to announce that the Spring Novice set is accepting applications for writers. I am particularly looking for applications for new and less-experienced writers who would like more opportunities to write questions and receive feedback. Application The application asks for a brief summary o...

ryanrosenberg

I am pleased to announce Spring Novice, a tournament designed to introduce new players to college quizbowl. I will be head editing, with assistance from Katherine Lei, Alex Damisch, and Chris Chiego. The writers for this tournament will be selected via application ; they will be announced here once ...

ryanrosenberg

ACF has updated the gameplay rules to specify that TDs can choose a different phrase (such as "directed" or "final") that teams can prepend to their answer to direct it.

ryanrosenberg

Not speaking officially for ACF here, but my personal thought is that the only way to have certainty about when a buzz occurred is to mark it when the moderator stops reading. The rule should be in Section D instead of Section DX then. To be clear, ACF hasn't decided on the rule here yet; that's ju...

ryanrosenberg

Most of these are good additions to the rules, but there are a couple that seem unnecessarily rigid to me. Specifically, these two: Added Section DX.2.B: "Whether or not a player buzzed before, at, or within less than a syllable after the power mark is a matter of moderator judgment, and is not pro...

ryanrosenberg

I assume this tournament is being delayed until in-person mirrors can be held? Playing a speedcheck tournament online sounds unfun.

ryanrosenberg

For me at least, generating pronunciation guides seems to be GPT3's killer app for quizbowl. I am *the worst* at writing these guides. GPT3 seems to do a pretty good job on these. It's not necessarily perfect (that first example invents syllables that don't exist) but I'm pretty sure it outperforms...

ryanrosenberg

Should be fixed now, I got my index pages mixed up.

ryanrosenberg

Ryan Rosenberg has volunteered to host it somewhere on the ACF website. More details from him to follow. The 1999 ACF archive can be found here. The MAQT archive from a similar time can be found here. Dave also included the likely-not-seen-in-20-years 1995 ACF Nationals program, which is up here. H...

ryanrosenberg

There are a couple of general tracks to studying for hard college and open tournaments. Because I'm a data scientist, I'll call them supervised learning and unsupervised learning . These don't actually correspond to the machine learning categories but they're a cute way to divide it up. Supervised l...

ryanrosenberg

Finally, as an older member of the community with a wide variety of trainings and experiences, I'll offer myself as a resource for younger male members of this community who are having issues navigating interpersonal relationships or recognizing uncomfortable situations. My DMs are open, as is my e...

ryanrosenberg

A standard code of conduct like Heather proposes is a good first step towards developing better norms of behavior in the community. Not speaking officially for PACE or ACF here, but I certainly imagine that if the community developed a code of conduct PACE and ACF would integrate it into their rules...

ryanrosenberg

Not related to this specific incident, but I think that PACE, NAQT, and ACF should do more outreach about the misconduct form. I think that all NAQT tournaments, ACF tournaments, and PACE qualifiers (as well as pretty much every other tournament) should require the hosts to inform all players and c...

ryanrosenberg

Are submissions still due next Sunday?

ryanrosenberg

What's the estimated timeline for this set? Some teams are looking for packets for a season-ending event.

ryanrosenberg

There's been a lot of discussion in the cheating warning thread about how people should think about punishment for Eric Mukherjee's cheating, and I wanted to start a separate thread to discuss more generally how the community should deal with cheating in online tournaments. To my mind, there are two...

ryanrosenberg

Contra Vasa, I don't think the statistical evidence presented in the thread is exonerating. Chris had an extremely good performance at Terrapin Open Online, even for his normally high level of performance. Other players have had performances of similar outlierness, but those players have had skill l...

ryanrosenberg

2020 ACF Nationals has been rescheduled to August 8-9 at Northwestern University. The feasibility of this rescheduled date is still tentative due to the ongoing pandemic, and teams and staff have been instructed to not make concrete plans for attending ACF Nationals on this weekend until the prospec...

ryanrosenberg

I would strongly prefer a one-day tournament; I think tossups-only will be better for that, but wouldn't particularly mind if we included bonuses.

ryanrosenberg

Possibly interested, depending on format.

ryanrosenberg

As someone who writes MS questions a lot, this overall feels like a pretty accessible distribution and one i'd feel good about as an introduction to the game. If anything, I feel like there might be room to expand basic literature just a little bit more. Most myth questions will feel literature-y, ...

ryanrosenberg

300 teams know who's gonna dominate HSNCT and that it's not them; a solid 200+ of them still have "fight for 6-4" as a legitimate aspiration, and I think a lot of the kids in the neighborhood that Dylan's quoting are among those 200 teams. There's nothing for those kids in college nats; the Regiona...

ryanrosenberg

Creating subsidiary titles is a very cheap and logistically easy way to give lots of teams something tangible to play for at a nationals. I'm not qualified to weigh in on this thread as a whole (having played little college quiz bowl and never been very serious about it as a player), but I do want ...

ryanrosenberg

A reminder that teams that initially qualified have until 11:59pm Central on Saturday, February 15th to accept or decline their bids to ACF Nationals. After that deadline, all bids will be automatically declined and released to the waitlist. Additionally, I've added ACF's policy on late drops from A...

ryanrosenberg

For the purposes of A-value, teams are ranked using all games against teams in their playoff bracket, first by winning percentage and then by PPG. This differs from ACF Nationals standings because the purpose of A-values is to determine team strength for Nationals qualification, whereas the purpose...

ryanrosenberg

person361 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 13, 2020 5:33 am In that case, Chicago E would be ahead of Northwestern A and Lewis would be ahead of Purdue B. Both pairs would be averaged.

These have been confirmed and fixed. I will take a look at the other issues tonight.

ryanrosenberg

I've edited the announcement with a link that teams can use to book hotel rooms in ACF's group block at the Hampton Inn & Suites Minneapolis University Area
.

ryanrosenberg

First, it seems like teams with the same record were ranked in Order of Finish by (playoff) PPG. I thought that it was tradition that teams with the same playoff record are officially recorded as having tied for the position (ex. here ). For the purposes of A-value, teams are ranked using all games...

ryanrosenberg

I ran a few numbers and it seems like a team's strength of schedule was calculated counting opponents' games against the team itself, when the website says that SOS should only be counting opponents' other games. If opponents' games against the team are taken out, it would boost the A-values of str...

ryanrosenberg

What are the procedures for applying for the waitlist? I don't see any instructions on the waitlist section of the A-value page, although I definitely could be missing something. EDIT: I found that it is under the bid form, my mistake. I've added clearer instructions (as well as instructions for si...

ryanrosenberg

Any team that wins an ACF Regionals tournament at which at least four total teams from at least two total schools are present will receive an automatic bid. Is there a reason that the winners of the Florida and British Columbia sites are not listed as receiving an invitation to Nationals? Sorry, th...

ryanrosenberg

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Mon Jan 13, 2020 4:00 pm Would people be interested in having CO with bouncebacks? If we stick to our planned length caps then I think it will be feasible.

I'm intrigued, but I think this would realistically only work if there's two-part bonuses.

ryanrosenberg

The editing structure for ACF Nationals has changed slightly; it will now be co-head edited by Ryan Westbrook and Matthew Bollinger.

ryanrosenberg

I've updated the first post with a link to the ACF distribution page, which contains the distribution teams should be referencing when writing packets.

ryanrosenberg

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Mon Nov 11, 2019 12:09 pm Minor thing - the statistics seem to be counting tiebreaker games as full games for PPG purposes (i.e. Columbia 2019 is counted as playing 17 games, but it played only 16 games worth of tossups).

This has been fixed.

ryanrosenberg

Finalized tossups for 2020 ACF Nationals will be capped at 8 lines in 10 point Times New Roman. However, this cap does not apply to submissions; submitting teams are allowed and encouraged to submit longer tossups.

ryanrosenberg

Right now the field appears to be at 15 teams, which is not an ideal number. Is there a possibility of another house team (or another outside team) to avoid byes?

ryanrosenberg

The announcement has been updated with details on packet submission and the fee schedule for ACF Nationals 2020.

ryanrosenberg

The only problem I did notice though was a problem that I think many sets at this difficulty suffer from, which is the tendency for some of the non big 3 categories (most notably fine arts and social science) to become probably a bit hard for this level. With a limited array of askable topics in th...

ryanrosenberg

I'm happy to announce the release of the ACF Statistics Database , a website collecting results from ACF Nationals since 2005. This database collects team and player statistics across multiple tournaments, provides nice box scores for individual games, and even has a record book . What data is in he...

ryanrosenberg

I'll also take this opportunity to plug the new ACF distribution page, which has the distributions for Fall, Regionals, and Nationals in one place, along with handy explanations of what goes in which category and how categories should be sub-distributed.

ryanrosenberg

Cheynem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:26 pm But WHICH one of the Twin Cities????????

Minneapolis, not Chicago.

ryanrosenberg

NOTE: Due to the ongoing outbreak of novel coronavirus, ACF Nationals 2020 has been cancelled. ACF Nationals 2020 will be held August 8-9 at Northwestern University . I will be reprising my role as TD from last year's tournament. COVID-19 Precautions Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ACF cannot guarant...

ryanrosenberg

Is there a possibility of an online mirror of this? I’d be interested in paying to play an online mirror. I'd also love to hear an online mirror and would be happy to support a good cause or the people who have written packets. There will be an online mirror within the next two weeks. I have been b...

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