The Quizbowl Resource Center

Mechanical Beasts

I think there might be an error in the "sides of triangles" TU. In Ceva's theorem you aren't multiplying the lengths of the sides, you're splitting up the lengths and then multiplying the ratios of the lengths. Yeah, that might have been better phrased as "portions of these" or ...

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as the NAC must still be considered in the company of actual national quiz bowl tournaments. Um, no? In context, what he's saying is "I regret that [I didn't make the NAC thread in miscellaneous] [because the thread that another poster made being in THIS subforum means that] the NAC must still...

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Why was Voter 5's ballot counted that way? Seeing as it only ranked two players, and Rob would have moved up a spot if Voter 5 thought Rob was better than like 20th. (And if that ballot held Matt to be third, Matt wouldn't have been able to move into second place like Rob would, but he would have ti...

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I'll note that barely under 75% of the top 25 players per this poll are undergraduates, indicating that the anti-grad students lunacy is still just that.

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That sounds like quite a bit less than for The Challenge here. $2000 for winning a region (Suffolk, Nassau, and Westchester have 32 teams each, NYC (just Bronx and Brooklyn) and Connecticut have 16 teams each, New Jersey has 48 teams), $10000 for winning the final game. Also, every student who make...

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Cernel Joson wrote:Yeah, for clarity's sake, that was a joke and not serious advice.

Humor? On the internet?

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I edited the Canute and Alfred tossups and am willing to believe the clues were too early, as that period of time is not my forte. It's MUT...those clues were fine where they were. Lamentably, thanks to this topic, they will not be in the future. The target audience of MUT is probably not people wh...

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Which is exactly why when people ramble on about what a great tiebreaker and predictive statistic PPB is I just laugh. That's true, this single data point is adequate justification. I don't think anyone says PPB is perfect, but it's certainly better than anything else available at comparing across ...

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by using smaller pools, it becomes more sensitive to wrong seeding information. While I would also be happy to work with the 64-team format, I believe in Andrew Hart's rebuttal of the above point, i.e. smaller pools mean that incorrect seeds have to put a team in the wrong one-sixth of the field to...

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Ukonvasara wrote:Yeah, I mean, wouldn't it be ten thousand times smarter to use these eight packets of regular-difficulty tossups for something like, uh, THUNDER?

And then maybe if THUNDER ends up with eight packets it doesn't need, those can become the side event.

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So I shouldn't infer from your saying that GSAC and BATE are your ideas of "regular difficulty" sets that you don't intend for regular difficulty to be defined as harder, since you keep pointing to GSAC as a harder set? I think he's making the semantic point that he wants GSAC/BATE to be ...

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Stats; note that some scoresheets lacked round numbers and so there's a round "0" in the round report (and so some matchups appear to have happened twice consecutively; they didn't in reality).

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Lapego1 wrote:My thesis was due three days after Nats, man, so don't rage on me. This tournament served as a convenient stress release the next Saturday.

My thesis was due the Thursday in between ICT and ACF; I went to both. It's silly one way or the other.

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In case people can't handle the .xlsx attachment, I saved a .xls copy of Fred's spreadsheet. Fred is absolutely right about this-- if the average team on this set can only get around 12 PPB then the set is being written harder than it needs to be. And this isnt something unique to this individual I...

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Umm if I am not mistaken any question that is asked rewards people that know stuff. As far as I can tell, as long as the lighting categories are of comparable difficulty, there isn't a problem with them being there. Timed lightning rounds can be unfair: 1) Unless each first, second, third, etc. par...

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Perhaps instead of novice-regular-nationals prep-nationals, we could think of (and advertise) our tournaments on a scale more along the lines of novice-easy regular-regular-more challenging regular-nationals prep-nationals. In college, where difficulty is better defined and quantized, for lack of a...

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I think biographical clues often raise the same sorts of red flags that come up when non-scientists write science questions and attempt to pick science clues. Biographical clues got the bad rap associated with early bad quizbowl, where minutiae reigned supreme. I'd say it takes a certain level of ex...

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Ondes Martenot wrote:I lost something like 255-345 to Matt Jackson in the first game of an advantaged final if anyone's wondering

I have all the scoresheets; I fell asleep a few hours after the tournament and just woke up. The stats will be up.

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Something I've noticed about Brian Ulrich's editing style is that his early clues appear to me to be far harder than other early clues. I can't control for the fact that I know nothing at all about geography, though. (It's also possible that there is simply generally less impetus to learn the nth mo...

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After six rounds and lunch, it seems RPI Aaron is undefeated, with Yale Matt's only loss to that very gent. (Yale A seems to be next.) My fading throat has been staved by some fortuitous assistance from Julia, who can now rotate through the various staffers.

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Angstrom wrote:Unless the results are based off anything but record

Texas is, if I recall, perilously near Georgia.

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They must have been a well-kept secret. Well-kept on "historybowl.com," where I--having never been to the site before--clicked on "official rules" on the left and then was taken to a page that lets you download the rules (admittedly doesn't pick up for things a moderator needs t...

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Yale dropped a team and neither Harvard nor MIT seem to be sending one, so: FORMAT We will be running a double round robin (10 rounds, 8 games) followed by finals. MEETING PLACE We will meet in building 2, room 2-105. Game rooms will be 2-142 and 2-143. Arrive before 9:00am, when play intends to st...

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Yale dropped a team and neither Harvard nor MIT seem to be sending one, so: FORMAT We will be running a double round robin (10 rounds, 8 games) followed by finals. MEETING PLACE We will meet in building 2, room 2-105. Game rooms will be 2-142 and 2-143. Arrive before 9:00am, when play intends to sta...

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I'm not sure how the first clue affects things, but it seems like crown ethers could have been accepted after template effect. Well... yes, insofar as anything can be described by a cone angle in some meaningful fashion, as long as it's coordinated to a metal ion. But the only time you'd be using t...

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I don't want to get bogged down in the debate about a single question, but there was nothing to intuit in the neutron EDM tossup; all those parts are required for very good reasons. Yes, it's a very hard question, probably too hard for all but a few players. But it's not ambiguous in any way. Just ...

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To use the Indonesia example as concretely as possible, we played Minnesota on that packet. I think it's probably approximately true that Minnesota and Harvard are two of the four strongest humanities teams in the country; the buzz on that tossup occurred on the name of Eduard Dekker. (Rob got it; I...

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I'll be doing a chem PhD at NYU, where I will try to cajole the team to host tournaments. I may help them host/direct, and I will definitely continue editing (set and--soon--subject) for NAQT, but I have retired from playing competitively.* *at some time in the future maybe I'll play an open or some...

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I also thought that sciences suffered from quite a few questions whose answer lines placed stipulations on answer lines of fairly germane tossups. I can think of the E1-BC tossup, the protein folding related tossup, the ubiquitin ligase, and the neutron EDM tossup in this regard. I can't help but t...

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Appears to be building 2--so go into the main MIT building and follow the signs.

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Hey--

It would be excellent to see how many teams can make it to this tournament: that means, northeast teams, to ask around.

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The one physics tossup that seemed super impossible was the tossup on the KAM theorem. I took a class on nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and we never once discussed it, nor was it anywhere in the book. While obviously there's some selection bias here, I felt it was quite difficult. I can't remember a...

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Well, despite not being a physicist I was aware of the neutron EDM as being a thing unto itself; it's come up in plenty of questions and in places-where-I've-read-about-physics. Though it was certainly a hard tossup, I don't think it was a bad idea--certainly not close to the hardest physics tossup ...

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Do sign up--Brown, you other regulars, this may be the last tournament of the season (and certainly the last novice tournament); there's no time like the present!

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(I am entirely ambivalent about timed rounds at tournaments with high-quality staff pools- ICT I'm not. The argument NAQT has made in the past in favor of shorter tossups was that shorter tossups permits more tossups per packet, and that their division of effectively a fixed amount of clue-reading ...

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I'm going to make the possibly-radical suggestion, and I guess this is as good a place to do it, that NAQT strongly consider using ten-minute halves at all levels of competition. Yes, the middle school questions are shorter, but middle schoolers also have a tendency to do things that slow down the ...

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Ken Jennings wrote:I eagerly await that thread.

Well, you've quite candidly admitted before that you never were nor will be the alpha and omega of competitive quizbowl, but you're the most famous (to the public) quizbowler. I think that's approximately the point Ted was making, anyway.

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it seems that there is still something to be desired about how tie-breaking half-packets are distributed. This is certainly true; I have asked R. what we can do to improve within-packet distributions for next year's tournaments. Wouldn't the simplest thing to do would be to have a standard per pack...

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That means the moderator could not ascertain that "mean" qualifies as an "other word." You can list a dozen "_golden_ [x] or _golden_ [y]" or you can hope that moderators are not completely illiterate. Yes, you could do the former. There is a point at which we are okay...

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Unless that bonus was written with the assumption that every reader at ICT would be competent in math, it really should explicitly say "accept _golden mean_" instead of the very general "accept other words in place of ratio." That seems like lazy answer-line editing to me. If th...

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I can confirm that the games listed as 27 TUH are games that went to OT. Also, I have a question for NAQT about tiebreaker tossups- do they count towards a team's bonus conversion? If they do, this seems unfair, since teams only hear tiebreaker tossups and not tiebreaker bonuses. (Obviously if I ha...

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As far as I can tell from the hotel website, it does not offer a shuttle to/from the airport. How good is the Sunday bus system in Pittsburgh to get to the airport to justify not renting a car? Every half hour, on the 25s and 55s, getting to the airport at the 17s and 47s, respectively. You won't f...

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While the field effects tossup was a great idea, its execution wasn't great. I assume it was chemistry given its first clue, so I'll look at it from that perspective. For one thing, they aren't discussed at the undergraduate level in chemistry at all. I'll take this as more or less okay as somethin...

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The tossup on helium II was pretty inspired, though I didn't figure out what was happening until after Andrew Hart was dancing on my grave--so I'll definitely say that the variety in tossup answers (both in inherent difficulty and in type) was healthy and good. Bonuses seemed much easier in science ...

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While the field effects tossup was a great idea, its execution wasn't great. I assume it was chemistry given its first clue, so I'll look at it from that perspective. For one thing, they aren't discussed at the undergraduate level in chemistry at all. I'll take this as more or less okay as something...

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I'll echo Ted's positive comments; I really enjoyed this set. I think Seth did a great job on the science. Difficulty seemed appropriate, and having a physics-y bias to the chemistry made the questions overall very interesting. Congratulations to Minnesota, as well; both games of the effective final...

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Susan wrote:Man, the tiebreaker should have been "number of teams whose flight to the tournament was cancelled".

We were only delayed!

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How might you suggest avoiding the midwest/mid-atlantic bias that has been seen in the past? PACE tends to use things like "statistics" to seed teams. Statistics don't inherently have a midwest/mid-atlantic bias, though I suppose if regions other than those tend to post statistics less fr...

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Then why not have every game on half packets if they're just as good? Because it's possible to write a tournament at this difficulty level that contains 23-25 packets of non-repeating material, as we did last year. Your strawman isn't convincing. No one said a sample of 10 questions is as good as a...

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So here's my concern: it's bad enough to be relegated to at best 17th place after 7 games. Being relegated to at best 25th after only 5 games? This requires near-perfect bracketing, which, based on the statistics from previous years, PACE (or really any other organization) just really isn't capable...

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