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Thanks for playing Terrapin XXIX! Please use this thread for any general comments on the set.

I may have more to say later, but for now: big thanks to all the writers, and to Billy Busse for editing the science. If anyone is interested, here's a breakdown of who wrote how much for which categories:

Literature: Jordan Brownstein (58), Ani Perumalla (27), Emma Stevens (23), Justin Hawkins (12)
History: Jordan (56), Weijia Cheng (30), Ani (25), Justin (9)
Science: Sam Rombro (56), Sarang Yeola (27), Billy Busse (24), Jordan (4), Weijia (1), Ophir Lifshitz (1)
Painting: Jordan (25), Sarang (5)
Music: Ophir (27), Jordan (2), Justin (1)
Other Arts: Jordan (11), Ani (6), Ophir (5), Justin (5), Sarang (2), Emma (1)
Religion: Weijia (25), Ani (5)
Myth: Ani (17), Jordan (7), Jason (5), Justin (1)
Philosophy: Jordan (24), Emma (4), Justin (2)
Social Science: Jordan (18), Weijia (8), Ophir (1), Justin (1), Sam (1)
Other: Ani (14), Weijia (13), Jordan (2), with a geography bonus from special guest Naveed Chowdhury

Discuss away!

I really enjoyed this set. It hit the difficulty target right on the nose and strikes me as a very good model of what regular should look like if the goal of easing it up marginally is carried forward.

Overall, this set was pretty good, with a number of issues. There were definitely tons of questions that got us all excited (Michael Baxandall bonus?!?), and the cluing was generally good. Tossups were, for the most part, structured to have flavorful second and even first clues, and bonuses were usually "interesting" à la Ike (or Jordan's questions for MYSTERIUM).

As Joey points out, the literature, history, philosophy, and a chunk of the arts were for the most part difficulty-controlled in a way that I think is a really good model going forward. On the other hand, that made many of the other bonuses really stick out. (I apologize for the lack of specifics—I don't have the packets yet—but, as an example, I'm remembering the two compsci bonuses where the easy parts were "MIME type" and "data type" respectively.)

In general, it seemed like there wasn't much oversight for the tournament as a whole, so that, for instance, the literature was usually well-controlled, while the rest of the tournament could range from LCAO/Slater determinant/something easy I can't remember to Denmark/La Sylphide/petit allegro. The tossups could range from a pretty difficult one on Stroessner to one on Australia that dropped "Bass Strait" well within power. (I've already talked to Ophir about the music, which was generally decent, but the tossups on Piano Sonatas—which included a description of the opening of Scriabin 5 like 3 lines in???—and Reveries—???—presumably could have been caught with just a little more oversight.)

There were a number of subdistributional issues. Could we see a breakdown of the religion by faith? Perhaps this was an artifact of which packets we heard (and my shitty/selective memory), but I think I remember 2 New Testament tossups and no questions at all on "Christian practice"? (Perhaps some of the "religious history" we heard, e.g. Quakers, was classified as religion? I don't think that's ideal.) On the other hand, we heard seemingly endless questions on Hinduism, which seems pretty much backwards subdistributionally (perhaps there was some Hinduism in the mythology distribution that was aggravating that)? Similarly, the music, while including a number of questions on pre-1600 music, was still relentlessly focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the relative exclusion (in particular) of the 18th century.

In general, we were a bit surprised by how close many of the topics ended up being to each other, despite the fact that this was a housewrite. Again, I apologize for the lack of specifics, but as an example I'm pretty sure there were questions on New York City for practically every part of its history, more or less to the exclusion of other American cities.

But just to reiterate, this was overall an enjoyable set. In functional terms: I don't think any of these issues hindered the set's ability to differentiate teams, and, again, much of the set was interesting, fun, and educational.

There were a number of subdistributional issues. Could we see a breakdown of the religion by faith? Perhaps this was an artifact of which packets we heard (and my shitty/selective memory), but I think I remember 2 New Testament tossups and no questions at all on "Christian practice"? (Perhaps some of the "religious history" we heard, e.g. Quakers, was classified as religion? I don't think that's ideal.) On the other hand, we heard seemingly endless questions on Hinduism, which seems pretty much backwards subdistributionally (perhaps there was some Hinduism in the mythology distribution that was aggravating that)?

As the person who wrote the majority of the religion questions, I can comment on this. Of the questions categorized as "religion," there was:

5/4 Christianity, including Bible (Epistle to the Romans, St. Peter, Rosary, Ephesus, Quakers, high priest of Israel, ophanim/giants/Gabriel, Gog and Magog/millenium/horns, eating food/dragons/Asherah, Azusa Street revival/speaking in tongues/Charismatic Christianity)
5/2 Islam (zakat, Al-Baqarah, Eid al-Adha, swords, Arabs, Iraq/marja al-taqlid/jurists, jinn/Solomon/qarin)
2/1 Judaism (high priest of Israel, bread, Talmud/Karaites/Torah scrolls)
1/2 Hinduism (Hinduism, ghee/abhisheka/cows, Shiva/om/tree)
1/1 Buddhism (Amitabha, Bodhidharma/staring at a wall/koans)
1/5 Other (water, Peacock Angel/Yazidism/Adam, Sikhism/Kaur/Guru Gobind Singh, Falun Gong/Li Hongzhi/wheels, Ahura Mazda/Yazd/India, Houses of Worship/Bahá’í Faith/Universal House of Justice)

While I wouldn't say that the subdistribution is perfect, there were definitely questions with clues about Christian practices (Rosary and the Pentecostalism bonus). There was in fact 1/2 Hindu myth, so that may have added to your perception that there was a lot of Hindu content.

vinteuil wrote: In general, we were a bit surprised by how close many of the topics ended up being to each other, despite the fact that this was a housewrite. Again, I apologize for the lack of specifics, but as an example I'm pretty sure there were questions on New York City for practically every part of its history, more or less to the exclusion of other American cities.

While there were likely subdistributional issues lurking in the history, this may not be the best example of such. I count one tossup on _New York_, and a tossup clue (in the _cigar_s question) and a bonus part (Greeley) that could conceivably be converted from knowledge of NYC history; this doesn't seem at all extravagant given the city's importance in American history.

Jem Casey wrote:

vinteuil wrote: In general, we were a bit surprised by how close many of the topics ended up being to each other, despite the fact that this was a housewrite. Again, I apologize for the lack of specifics, but as an example I'm pretty sure there were questions on New York City for practically every part of its history, more or less to the exclusion of other American cities.

While there were likely subdistributional issues lurking in the history, this may not be the best example of such. I count one tossup on _New York_, and a tossup clue (in the _cigar_s question) and a bonus part (Greeley) that could conceivably be converted from knowledge of NYC history; this doesn't seem at all extravagant given the city's importance in American history.

I suppose I was also including the Bill de Blasio question and possibly one other current events question?

And about the religion: we in fact didn't hear the Ephesus question, and I forgot about the Rosary question. I still question locating much of the old testament in the "Christianity" distribution, but that's a separate debate.

I would have called it more of an issue with "India" subdistribution in general; we have an Indian player on our team, and we were (joking on) getting at least one 30/tossup a round if you included Indian religions, Hinduism, South Asian history, and South Asian geography. Now you could argue that South Asian content just deserves to make up that much of the set, because it's important stuff; but you could just as easily argue otherwise.

Short-beaked echidna wrote:I really enjoyed this set. It hit the difficulty target right on the nose and strikes me as a very good model of what regular should look like if the goal of easing it up marginally is carried forward.

This set was very good. There seemed to be more South Asian content than normal, but deffos the most fun I've had at a regular difficulty tournament in a long while.

The chemistry was especially excellent. You cannot tell how long I've been waiting for a tossup to lead in with the Darken equations.

Oh yeah, the set was pretty good in general, I should add. Other minor complaint about the subdistro: there seemed to be a lot of molecular/quantum chem + quantum phys + astronomy (not even cosmology), and not as much organic chem or engineering. Like, I think there were tossups on Schrodinger, MOs, harmonic oscillators, and a decent number of other stuff?

Here’s all the South Asian content in the set:

2/5 RM (1/2 pure Hindu myth, 1/2 Hindu religion, 0/1 sikhism)
0/1 Lit (White Tiger bonus)
1/2 History (British Raj, Savitri Devi bonus, religion in the Mughal empire bonus)
1/0 Geography (Tamil Nadu - which was a bad idea, sorry)

Overall, this was 4/8 questions, of which I wrote 3/7. I understand that (if this was distributed evenly) this would be around .8 “South Asian content” per packet, but I thought that this was a reasonable amount since it represented just 12 questions (2%) of the set as a whole. However, I didn’t expect it to be so noticeable. I apologize if this was detrimental to the set.

Sorry about the Bass Strait drop in the Australia tossup; we’ll fix it for future mirrors.

crash bandicoot wrote:Here’s all the South Asian content in the set:

2/5 RM (1/2 pure Hindu myth, 1/2 Hindu religion, 0/1 sikhism)
0/1 Lit (White Tiger bonus)
1/2 History (British Raj, Savitri Devi bonus, religion in the Mughal empire bonus)
1/0 Geography (Tamil Nadu - which was a bad idea, sorry)

Overall, this was 4/8 questions, of which I wrote 3/7. I understand that (if this was distributed evenly) this would be around .8 “South Asian content” per packet, but I thought that this was a reasonable amount since it represented just 12 questions (2%) of the set as a whole. However, I didn’t expect it to be so noticeable. I apologize if this was detrimental to the set.

Was it just me or was there a Cambodia bonus, too? I guess that's Southeast Asia, but I vaguely remember some stuff that wasn't listed here, like that bonus, and also a...Indonesia bonus, I think? I mean, I was okay with it, Vimal just cleaned up on those questions, but you know...

UlyssesInvictus wrote:Oh yeah, the set was pretty good in general, I should add. Other minor complaint about the subdistro: there seemed to be a lot of molecular/quantum chem + quantum phys + astronomy (not even cosmology), and not as much organic chem or engineering. Like, I think there were tossups on Schrodinger, MOs, harmonic oscillators, and a decent number of other stuff?

There was plenty of orgo in the set. In the 12 packets played at your site, there were 4 orgo tossups (carbonyl, aldol, elimination, 90% of the copper question) and 3.5 orgo bonuses (solvolysis/sn1, half the chirality bonus, total synthesis, conjugation), which comes out to around 31% orgo, which is my goal (30-35%). Trust me when I say that college quizbowl used to have more orgo, and it was not a good thing (due to how easy orgo is to flashcard compared to other areas of chemistry).

Re: the quantum, I did notice there was a preponderance of quantum stuff in the set, but QM is pretty important so I let it slide as just a stylistic skew. I didn't think it was particularly major.

Re: cosmology, there was cosmology. There was a tossup on the CMBR and a bonus about the mathematics of general relativity (which is required to really understand cosmology).

Re: engineering, I think you have a point here. I made sure there was plenty of "applied" science-type stuff in the set, but it mostly skewed towards "things experimentalists do" rather than "things engineers do." The only engineering content I can think of was the tossup on alloys (MatSe), the bonus part on lift (aerospace), and the first half of the tossup on rivers (environmental). I probably should have written like 2 more engineering questions.

Yeah, I'm totally going off my mid-term memory, I'm not going to stick to my guns on any of those things I listed. I think complaining about subdistribution in general is a little silly, and obviously, I'm not a science player, so I'll note that on the other side of the spectrum, I liked the arts a lot--I think there was an even an arts bonus on African art, and a tossup on Ai Weiwei, which was amazing and definitely a movement away from Western art cool to see in QB.

I really enjoyed playing this set - thank you very much to everyone who produced it. Extra thanks to whoever was responsible for the (albeit small amount of) linguistics content. The answer lines were well-chosen and well-clued - the tossup on "D" made me especially happy given I had just submitted a paper on the DP hypothesis.

Though I managed to miss half of the tournament, I too found this very enjoyable. Aside from the odd dodgy question as mentioned in the other thread, I was relatively happy with the questions on the small number of things I know enough about to comment on.

I particularly enjoyed the maths, which seemed to me to be pitched at just about the right level, and asked about things that students actually learn. Also, even though the clue was probably a bit out of place, using the Marcinkiewicz Interpolation Theorem as a lead-in to a tossup makes me absurdly happy - the sooner we create a mandatory 4/4 functional analysis distribution the better.

I enjoyed playing this set quite a bit. I'm only qualified to speak about history and geography, but overall, I thought the history was clued very well. Constantly throughout the tournament, I felt like I was buzzing on history clues that I had learned straight from a class or independent reading, as opposed to some rando quiz bowl packet I'd read in the past (although that certainly happened as well). I don't know exactly how you guys managed it, but I thought that aspect of the tournament was stellar.

Regarding difficulty control, there was noticeable difficulty variation between tossups on occasion, although not enough to necessarily detract from the game. I'll leave some scattered thoughts on that in the other thread.

Overall I really liked the set and was pleasantly surprised with the difficulty level. I may be biased though because I finally got to power a question based on knowing something about zebu farming which made my day.

This may not be worth fixing, but the pronouns could have been clearer and stated more frequently. I remember being super confused by pronouns for a handful of questions (e.g. Disney, mountains, rainbows, lightness, and text as a visual element). This might be tied to the creativity of answerlines though, which was part of why I liked the set so much.

My only actual complaint with the set was that I got really sick of hearing "this play" or "this poet." Do you have a breakdown of what the lit actually worked out to be? It seemed to be an ungodly amount of plays and poetry, fewer novels, and almost no short stories. This may just be a reflection of how much I hate plays and poetry so I noticed when they came up but it really seemed like a lot. Similarly, social science seemed to be dominated by economics with hardly any psychology or other social sciences.

I may be biased though because I finally got to power a question based on knowing something about zebu farming which made my day.

Glad to see that you enjoyed this question, and that someone was able to buzz off this clue!

Similarly, social science seemed to be dominated by economics with hardly any psychology or other social sciences.

This might have something to do with the packetization, since there was 4/4 economics in the set total. While I agree that this was a substantial amount, there were plenty of other social sciences in the set.

eliza.grames wrote: This may not be worth fixing, but the pronouns could have been clearer and stated more frequently. I remember being super confused by pronouns for a handful of questions (e.g. Disney, mountains, rainbows, lightness, and text as a visual element). This might be tied to the creativity of answerlines though, which was part of why I liked the set so much.

My only actual complaint with the set was that I got really sick of hearing "this play" or "this poet." Do you have a breakdown of what the lit actually worked out to be? It seemed to be an ungodly amount of plays and poetry, fewer novels, and almost no short stories. This may just be a reflection of how much I hate plays and poetry so I noticed when they came up but it really seemed like a lot.

The mountains tossup used multiple pronouns; we'll fix that. The rainbow tossup's pronoun was "this thing" and the Disney tossup's pronoun was "this person" or "a structure named for this person" — maybe these were a bit confusing to process at game speed.

Here's the lit sub-distro (if my counting is correct): Novels: 23/22 ; Theater: 10/7 ; Short Fiction: 5/4 ; Poetry: 17/16 ; Other/Mixed: 5/11

ElysiaJW wrote:I really enjoyed playing this set - thank you very much to everyone who produced it. Extra thanks to whoever was responsible for the (albeit small amount of) linguistics content. The answer lines were well-chosen and well-clued - the tossup on "D" made me especially happy given I had just submitted a paper on the DP hypothesis.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! You can thank Ophir for that tossup; the bonus on Uralic languages was my doing.

As a freshman who played his first college set ever, I really liked it. I was a bit intimidated going into the tournament, but I ended up having fun. If this is what a "regular" difficulty set is like, then I am all for it. Props to the writers & editors.

randomguy1997 wrote:As a freshman who played his first college set ever, I really liked it. I was a bit intimidated going into the tournament, but I ended up having fun. If this is what a "regular" difficulty set is like, then I am all for it. Props to the writers & editors.

Don't worry, we'll baptise you in fire at Nats.

But yes, Jon brings up a great point that Terrapin promised to be regular difficulty and then actually was, which is becoming a surprisingly popular thing to do at the college level. Maybe the Nats power creep will finally start reversing...?

I'm not sure what these complaints about South Asian content are based on - South Asia is a region that is home to a very large portion of the world's population, and has had enormous cultural influence on other regions of the world. Dedicating 2% of the tournament to important humanities topics relevant to South Asia does not seem at all unreasonable.

EDIT: I also agree with all the people saying this set was on-point with difficulty, and a model for regular sets going forward. The philosophy, social science, and what literature I knew all struck me as very high quality, and all of the categories seemed strong in general.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:I'm not sure what these complaints about South Asian content are based on - South Asia is a region that is home to a very large portion of the world's population, and has had enormous cultural influence on other regions of the world. Dedicating 2% of the tournament to important humanities topics relevant to South Asia does not seem at all unreasonable.

The main thing I've gotten out of this discussion is that Vimal Konduri has strong knowledge of India across a variety of subject areas. That's good for him!

I thought that this tournament was phenomenally written and hit the target difficulty for the most part. In particular, the music questions used strong, evocative, and unique clues from a variety of sources (e.g. internal descriptions, program notes, theoretical clues, historical context). My only issue, as others have explained before me, was with the excessively difficult tossup lead-ins and bonus third parts, which I think can be fixed up easily. I also was overwhelmed by the number of theory- or note transcription-based clues, particularly in the piano sonata tossup; these clues tend to get very mentally taxing to parse and identify in large quantities, especially when the moderator is reading at a natural quizbowl pace.

I also thought that the linguistics questions at this tournament were phenomenally written. I agree with Ellie that the syntax-focused question on d was exciting and cool, even though I negged it terribly. The bonus parts on vowel harmony and location were also cool to see because they focused on the typology of and common features across broad language systems, allowing teams to score points without knowing about the specific inner workings of a single language in particular.

Just wanted to add to the general sentiment that this set was very well-written and enjoyable to play. I thought it hit reasonable difficulty targets and agree that that level will hopefully be emulated more in the future!

I don't have much to add other than thanks for a really great set, especially to Sam, Billy, and others for a very well-executed science distribution. I also thought the literature was excellent. There was one packet that seemed to have two CS bonuses (I think it was round 10? The first round of playoffs at the main site), which was odd. I don't recall any specific content issues other than also being confused by the protein folding bonus part and thinking that the leadin to the C. elegans tossup was quite easy.

(As a general note--if you're going to write a tossup on a model organism, keep in mind that gene nomenclature convention varies substantially from organism to organism, and this can often make clues easier than you think. Drosophila genes have English-word names, and are usually stupid adjectives, like Frazzled, or pop culture references, like groucho. C. elegans genes all have three letters, a hyphen, and a number, and are usually shortened forms of an adjective describing the mutant phenotype. Saccharomyces genes all have three letters, no hyphen, and a number, and are usually formal abbreviations. etc. etc.)

Any set with an entire bonus about MATLAB wins my affection, so kudos there. And I thought there was quite a bit of fluid mechanics to satisfy engineers, too.

The math in this set, while not flawless, was refreshingly good. Both tossups I heard had important early clues that have virtually never come up, namely Marcinkiewicz interpolation (never come up) and Sobolev spaces (come up once). More impressively, every bonus part, with one exception that I don't have the statistics expertise to judge, was on something I would unhesitatingly call important.

The one criticism I will make is that all the math I recall, with the exception of the determinant clue for invertibility, was analysis. This may be an artifact of which packets were read, but if not, then distributions shouldn't be this skewed toward a subdistribution. However, given that I'm not an analyst, I think this makes it even more impressive that I enjoyed the math as much as I did.

I thought this was a fantastic tournament, certainly the best this year, and as good of a regular event as I've played in a while. Of course, given the editing staff, you didn't expect any issues - but I also thought this tournament had some really great content that rewarded areas of knowledge (or maybe more accurately approaches to knowledge?) that don't typically get rewarded in the majority of quizbowl questions. I wish I had the questions so I could better explain what I mean... I think the closest comparison is probably VICO, which was fairly widely recognized as finding rich new material to fold into the canon. It wasn't that Terrapin just asked about a bunch of random hard things that hadn't come up (in fact it kept difficulty down quite well), it was more that it found aspects of topics across history, thought, humanities, and general world knowledge that show up in academic literatures that aren't traditionally represented in quizbowl. I certainly hope this trend continues, but that's mainly because I actually read those literatures, and only get like 0-1 tournaments/year that seem to really reflect them; I don't think the content of this set (at least in the categories I know decently well) is like, the only good way to do them, but it's sure nice to have the variety.

To the extent that I'd offer a critique, it'd be that what I described above was much more noticeable in tossups than in bonuses - I did think some of the bonus parts were either a bit easy or obscure in a not-so-interesting way (eg, Ophanim), but that's a pretty minor quibble (if it's even the kind of thing that really can be meaningfully corrected).

This tournament was a lot of fun. Thanks for writing it and hosting a Skype mirror!

I generally liked the "find a common answer line, alter it slightly, and write a kind-of common link tossup on it" approach, although every once in a while that could lead to tossups being somewhat easier to figure out than usual.

I just want to say that I really, really liked the tossup on violence that mentioned Luke Tierney's uncle. Also I really, really like the fact that Luke negged it.