The Quizbowl Resource Center

I'm sorry to announce this so soon before the event, but it appears our only option is to turn this into a QUADS event. This is entirely due to the fact that we only have 4 rooms and 3 buzzer sets (still looking for one more). We will have a strict cap of 8 teams for this event, and please please please try to be registered by before this weekend so it's not a last minute scramble. If you feel that you are unable to find two other people to join your team, PM me or send an email to "will AT willoverman DOT com" and I will combine you with two other people searching for a team. I am very sorry that we had to make this change.

Additionally, in order to avoid later confusion, I think it's best to say that the first 8 teams to sign up are the ones who are guaranteed to play, i.e. having signed up as a duo beforehand does not ensure a spot; you should reach out to some other duo and form a quad. I've set up a new sheet on the sign up doc for forming quads http://tinyurl.com/pw7l5me

What is the limiting factor that is keeping the cap at 8 teams? Is it rooms, buzzers, or both?

Smuttynose Island wrote:What is the limiting factor that is keeping the cap at 8 teams? Is it rooms, buzzers, or both?

both

Will, I can offer one of Duke's buzzer sets for this at PACE. I'd also be fine staffing this if that is needed/wanted.

Bensonfan23 wrote:Will, I can offer one of Duke's buzzer sets for this at PACE. I'd also be fine staffing this if that is needed/wanted.

Both of those things would be greatly appreciated!

Information for the PACE site:

PACE's tentative schedule says that round 12 should be done by 6:00, so I think a good time for this would be arrival to the main room by 7:15 and start by 7:30. I will let people know what the main room is once we get our hotel rooms tomorrow.

Right now there are six teams of four registered, and three people on the free agents list. Since I just put up this new form a couple days ago, I'll assume everyone on it truly intends on playing and I don't need confirmation emails. A team's spot isn't reserved until it puts itself down in one of the 8 spots, so the free agents should really contact each other. Also, it would be really nice if we could actually reach 8 teams since then we can run on a simple round robin.

I think that's everything, if you have any questions email me at will AT willoverman DOT com.

Okay, the main room that everyone should show up to is room 528. Please try to be there by 7:15 so we can start at 7:30ish.

There's still room for one more team, if no one else signs up then either some team willing to could split in half or we could have a round robin with a bye. Some team splitting sounds like the better idea to me in that case, but hopefully we can just get another team.

I'm sorry for the last minute change, but I've been asked by multiple people to change the start time of this to 8:00. So if everyone can get there before about 8ish that would be great. People should still meet in room 528.

This event happened more or less successfully. The deciding match was between the 6-0 teams of Tommy Casalaspi, Daniel Hothem, James Bradbury, and Victoria Cui vs. Eric Mukherjee, Max Schindler, Andrew Wang, Chris Ray, AND Ike Jose. Despite their noted science specialist, Chris Ray, leading the latter team to a superior score, Eric Mukherjee's team lost the tournament on the technicality of playing with 5 people at once. Thanks to everyone who came out to play and staff!

This was an interesting diversion. Thanks to Will, Farah, et al for writing it!

One comment I will make is that some lead-ins were just unbuzzable, which is perhaps tied to the number of specific paper clues. Contrary to some other people (or maybe straw men), I think paper clues are perfectly justified for landmark papers that are hard to clue other than by describing the content of the paper. But, to take an example from a topic I know pretty well, the second line of the tossup on "fitness" mentions some work by people named Kobayashi and Sughiyama, which as far as I can tell (and correct me if I'm wrong!) come from these papers:

http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10 ... .91.032120 (one citation)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.02201 (possibly not even published? also the only citation to the previous paper)

I can't comment on how important this work is; for all I know these might be really cool papers. But I think the chance that anybody would buzz on them is close to zero - they don't even appear to have made a big splash among evolutionary biologists, let alone quiz bowl players, most of whose exposure to that material is from secondary sources. The same could be said for a lot (though not all) of "Gene X modulates response Y in organism Z"; it can take some kind of heuristic judgment to determine which of these results are really important and well-known outside a narrow field, and which are the sorts of standard workhorse results of which there are dozens each month.

On the other hand, I think there's something to be said for fun or whimsical lead-ins at side events like this. I was amused by the lead-in to the "diamonds" question (a screw palm that only grows on kimberlite-containing soil?!) even though I had no clue what it was. If you think the Kobayashi/Sughiyama clue is really cool and want to share it with the world, I think that's fine as long as it's done sparingly.

Anyway, I don't want that to detract from the fact that this tournament was quite fun and amusing overall, and I'm glad I played.

I will agree with Shan's comments. This set certainly wasn't perfect, but it was still a lot of fun.

One thing I have to mention, though, as a PSA for anyone writing biology questions in the future: the sentence "PBS is a common wash buffer for this technique" is about as unhelpful as a clue can get. PBS is used as a wash buffer for more or less everything.

This set was a blast to play (shout-out to Shan, Oliver, and Julian for helping make it so). I appreciated that there was definitely an effort to be "real" in most of the questions. My biggest complaint would just be that questions could often be fairly/very transparent, but that wasn't too widespread of a problem.

This was great fun (the math in particular!), and I recommend anyone who hasn't had a chance to play it find a mirror site! Thanks a ton for running this!

Will the stats from the NSC site be up at any point?

Mewto55555 wrote:This was great fun (the math in particular!), and I recommend anyone who hasn't had a chance to play it find a mirror site! Thanks a ton for running this!

Thanks! I had a lot of fun writing the math (especially the differential geometry), so I'm glad to hear it was appreciated.

Mewto55555 wrote:Will the stats from the NSC site be up at any point?

Apparently stats weren't kept in every room for all the rounds or the scoresheets somehow got lost. I'm really sorry and disappointed myself about this. I will post what I have after my exams and NASAT are over.

Vainamoinen wrote:

Mewto55555 wrote:This was great fun (the math in particular!), and I recommend anyone who hasn't had a chance to play it find a mirror site! Thanks a ton for running this!

Thanks! I had a lot of fun writing the math (especially the differential geometry), so I'm glad to hear it was appreciated.

Mewto55555 wrote:Will the stats from the NSC site be up at any point?

Apparently stats weren't kept in every room for all the rounds or the scoresheets somehow got lost. I'm really sorry and disappointed myself about this. I will post what I have after my exams and NASAT are over.

I think some of these might be the scoresheets from my room. I'll send what I have sometime this week, Will.

This was great fun! Thanks so much Will for running this! Getting to watch quiz bowl greats like Eric Mukherjee and Ike Jose play was a delightful thing. I sure hope we see more of Feynman's BONGOS soon.