Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

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Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Matt Weiner »

Discuss DISCO aka the Texas Quizbowl Camp tournament here. If you played VCU Open at Minnesota in August, you are not playing this set until September, so close this thread now!
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion - don't open if you are fro

Post by Cheynem »

I liked this tournament.

A couple questions/points

1. The original distro did not mention trash, and there was a bit of trash. Was the distribution modified I take it?

2. The science seemed to have entirely too much conceptual math for my tastes. I might be biased in that I don't like it, but a lot of other people at our site and other sites too felt there was a lot of math. What did others think?
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion - don't open if you are fro

Post by Corry »

My brother Kevin and I read this tournament while on a road trip this summer.
Cheynem wrote:2. The science seemed to have entirely too much conceptual math for my tastes. I might be biased in that I don't like it, but a lot of other people at our site and other sites too felt there was a lot of math. What did others think?
As the science player on this year's Arcadia A, but also as a dude who does not particularly like comp sci or math, Kevin wasn't thrilled about this tournament's science distro, which he claimed had more math and compsci than "any tournament I have ever played or read in my entire life".

On the other hand, I really liked the history in this tournament, which I feel played exactly to my own interests.

Either way, I felt like all of the categories in DISCO had an extremely strong personal bent to them-- each category really seemed like it was entirely written by one single person (or a few very likeminded people with very similar tastes). This either worked on your favor, or didn't.
Last edited by Corry on Sun Sep 21, 2014 1:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Mewto55555 »

Hey, I know it's really hard to come up with stuff to fill, say, a 1/1 math distro. That just means you should try extra hard to come up with good answers to make people think 1/1 math is doable. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to reach into the olympiad rabbit-hole and pull out redacted terrible answerline.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Corry »

Mewto55555 wrote:Hey, I know it's really hard to come up with stuff to fill, say, a 1/1 math distro. That just means you should try extra hard to come up with good answers to make people think 1/1 math is doable. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to reach into the olympiad rabbit-hole and pull out redacted terrible answerline.
Speaking of which, how 'bout this tossup:

Uncleared question material removed. -the Mgmt.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Schmidt Sting Pain Index »

Will this set be made publicly available?
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Romero »

The set has not been made public. Please do not post questions from it.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Mewto55555 wrote:Hey, I know it's really hard to come up with stuff to fill, say, a 1/1 math distro. That just means you should try extra hard to come up with good answers to make people think 1/1 math is doable. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to reach into the olympiad rabbit-hole and pull out redacted terrible answerline.
Would agree, was underwhelmed by this
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Why is the set not public?
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Romero »

Texas Quiz Bowl has no current plans to release it publicly. We are considering future options.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Fado Alexandrino »

Mewto55555 wrote:That doesn't mean it's a good idea to reach into the olympiad rabbit-hole and pull out redacted terrible answerline.
This answer line didn't feel that out of whack; although getting it early would probably have needed some deep content knowledge, it's something we learned in grade 10.

CS on the other hand, had way more of industry/internship content than stuff you learn in high school. (mods remove this statement if it can be considered discussing content)
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Since no new tournaments have been announced using this set, the announcement thread has not been updated regarding future uses, and no NAQT-style discussion embargo ending date has been publicly announced, I am going to reopen discussion of this tournament in accordance with our policy on the matter. If the DISCO editors are willing to provide any of the above things, I'm happy to adjust this thread status accordingly.

Please do not post the entire set without the permission of the DISCO editors; however, as the policy thread indicates, limited discussion/presentation of question content in the style of the yearly NAQT threads is okay.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Mewto55555 »

Of course the Chicago team doesn't have a copy of this set, and of course we aren't reading it in practice right now, but can I re-iterate one more time how terrible this tournament's math is? Please can someone post just those questions for discussion so I can give whoever wrote it some helpful pointers???
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Amizda Calyx »

Some DISCO math:
The conclusion of Disquisitiones Arithmeticae lists 38 integers less than 300 representing this possibility. When input into Euler's totient function, each of those integers yields a power of (**) 2, a necessary condition for the figures central to this process. The first proposition of the first book of Euclid’s elements offers a method for the simplest (*) example of this process. Valid for multiples of 6, 10, and 17, every member of this process’s corresponding sequence must be a multiple of a Fermat prime. For 10 points, name this mathematical process that a 19-year-old Gauss accomplished with a 17-sided heptadecagon in 1789.
ANSWER: compass and straightedge construction of regular polygons [prompt on construction or construction of polygons]
According to Varignon’s theorem, one of these figures is created by connecting the midpoints of the sides of any figure with a certain number of sides. The sum of the squares of the sides of this figure equals the sum of the squares of its (**) diagonals is one sufficient condition for a figure of this type. In some horribly misguided textbooks, the words "at least" in an unrelated definition imply that this type of figure is special case of a (*) trapezoid. The magnitude of the cross product of two vectors is the area of a corresponding quadrilateral of this type, and adding two vectors together can be visualized as the diagonal of this figure. For 10 points, name this specific quadrilateral that is formed from two pairs of non-intersecting lines.
ANSWER: parallelogram [prompt on quadrangle, do not prompt other geometric figures]
Camille Jordan and Giuseppe Peano formally defined this concept in terms of its "outer" and "inner" variants as the greatest lower and least upper bounds of the current understanding of this measure. The properties of this idea were believed to include (**) monotonicity and additivity by ancient Greek mathematicians. For a collection of points, this measure can be calculated by listing the points in two columns and finding the difference between the sum of the elements when multiplied diagonally. Archimedes used the method of (*) exhaustion to find this quantity for a parabola in terms of triangles, and it is related by Cavalieri to monomial anti-derivatives. For 10 points, name this property of a regular polygon that is one-half the product of its perimeter and apothem.
ANSWER: area
In a 1927 book, Elisha Loomis divided 371 members of this collection into four categories, including "Quaternionic" and "Dynamic." That work credited another member of this collection called the "folding bag" to 19-year-old Stanley Jashemski. The Plimpton (**) 322 tablet is evidence that at least one of these was known to the ancient Babylonians circa 1800 BC. The organization (*) Mu Alpha Theta uses as its logo a setup called the "Bride's Chair" that Euclid used for one of these with the construction of two auxiliary lines. Edmund Landau used infinite series to develop a trigonometric approach to this task while Leonardo DaVinci used a hexagon and James Garfield employed a trapezoid. For 10 points, identify this verification of the principle that a right triangle has side lengths such that a squared plus b squared equals c squared.
ANSWER: proofs of the Pythagorean theorem
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Muriel Axon »

I think the Plimpton 322 clue in the proofs of the Pythagorean theorem question is just wrong. Plimpton 322 lists Pythagorean triples (which is what I buzzed, and got negged, with), or something near enough; you can know various Pythagorean triples without proving the theorem or even knowing it to be true.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Ike »

I know this is going to be funny to some because I used to make a whole lot of copy-editing errors; but some of these clues are impossible to parse. The phrases:
The conclusion of Disquisitiones Arithmeticae lists 38 integers less than 300 representing this possibility
Camille Jordan and Giuseppe Peano formally defined this concept in terms of its "outer" and "inner" variants as the greatest lower and least upper bounds of the current understanding of this measure
The organization (*) Mu Alpha Theta uses as its logo a setup called the "Bride's Chair" that Euclid used for one of these with the construction of two auxiliary lines.
aren't resembles English, as intended for she was to be spoken.

The problem with example 1 is that its pronoun isn't semantically correct: "straightedge and compass construction" isn't a "possibility" in any normal sense. Furthermore, the writer invites confusion by saying "38 integers less than 300" when you're actually talking about constructible polygons, not integers.

I would rewrite the clue as follows:
The conclusion of Disquisitiones Arithmeticae lists 38 objects for which this can be done
Of course, this question may now be too transparent, but that probably means it's not making for a good tossup. Please don't fudge the understandability of the content of your question so that it becomes a less fraudable tossup - write on something else and convert this to a bonus.

With example 2, most of the sentence is fine, but the part I highlighted in bold just adds confusion - there's no way to figure out what the writer means at game speed, partly because "current understanding of this measure" is an ill-defined phrase - there is no universally agreed upon "current understanding of area" to mathematicians, and also because the Jordan-Peano measure is also a thing, and the usage of the word measure conflicts with their usage of the word measure. I would make a recommendation as to how to reword the tossup, but a quick glance on Wikipedia tells me that the clue is non-unique for area - it also applies to length and volume, so I don't know how I would reword it.

With example 3, it's impossible to figure out how the Mu Alpha Theta's logo clue is helpful at all. Also, it's not clear what the second bolded phrase really means at all at game speed. I would rewrite this sentence as follows so that it makes sense:
The logo of the organization (*) Mu Alpha Theta is a visual representation of one of these; Euclid augmented that so-called "Bride's Chair" logo with two auxiliary lines to produce another one of these
I sincerely hope that whoever wrote these questions will take these criticisms to heart - it's always good to have more math writers around. I don't think any of these are really bad tossup ideas for a high school level event, (although I think it's hard to do the constructibility tossup well,) but they do have semantic issues that make them very hard to play. I had trouble understanding these questions through reading while sipping on my earl grey tea with soy milk in my ergonomic chair as the soundtrack to Moo Moo Meadows was playing. During gameplay, some moderators fudge words and players will be hearing these questions at game speed in possibly a room with bad acoustics, so you will want to make sure your questions are as simple to understand as possible.

Addendum: I know some people will rebuke me for using substantives as a quizbowl pronoun, but that doesn't change my overall point.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by Ike »

Muriel Axon wrote:I think the Plimpton 322 clue in the proofs of the Pythagorean theorem question is just wrong. Plimpton 322 lists Pythagorean triples (which is what I buzzed, and got negged, with), or something near enough; you can know various Pythagorean triples without proving the theorem or even knowing it to be true.
What I think happened here is that the question writer was saying that "Because the Plimpton 322 lists a bunch of Pythagorean triples, they must have known of the existence of at least one proof of the Pythagorean theorem." That's not necessarily true by logic, but even if it were, that's pretty much impossible to figure out at game speed.

There are a couple of other clues in the examples that, while semantically correct and are thus parseable, are impossible to decipher:
In some horribly misguided textbooks, the words "at least" in an unrelated definition imply that this type of figure is special case of a (*) trapezoid.
I have no idea what this sentence is talking about, even though it makes sense to me semantically.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by coldstonesteveaustin »

Ike wrote:
In some horribly misguided textbooks, the words "at least" in an unrelated definition imply that this type of figure is special case of a (*) trapezoid.
I have no idea what this sentence is talking about, even though it makes sense to me semantically.
I'm pretty sure it means "some horribly misguided textbooks define trapezoids as a quadrilateral with at least one pair of parallel sides, which implies that a parallelogram is a special case of a trapezoid." However, in gameplay, answering that tossup would necessitate piecing together the words "at least" and "this type of figure is special case of a trapezoid", calling into mind this Venn Diagram (http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/learning/ ... _02_04.jpg), and using some lateral thinking. I'm not sure if players can do that.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by coldstonesteveaustin »

However, DISCO is somewhat biased, because "according to Wikipedia" there is a debate on the definition of trapezoid and whether it includes parallelograms. Particularly, the first sentence of the article on "Trapezoid" mentions "at least one pair" before mentioning the debate in the next paragraph.
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Re: Texas Camp/ DISCO discussion

Post by jonpin »

Hidehiro Anto wrote:
Ike wrote:
In some horribly misguided textbooks, the words "at least" in an unrelated definition imply that this type of figure is special case of a (*) trapezoid.
I have no idea what this sentence is talking about, even though it makes sense to me semantically.
I'm pretty sure it means "some horribly misguided textbooks define trapezoids as a quadrilateral with at least one pair of parallel sides, which implies that a parallelogram is a special case of a trapezoid." However, in gameplay, answering that tossup would necessitate piecing together the words "at least" and "this type of figure is special case of a trapezoid", calling into mind this Venn Diagram (http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/learning/ ... _02_04.jpg), and using some lateral thinking. I'm not sure if players can do that.
For clarification on that Venn diagram:
The word trapezium, used to describe a geometric shape, has two contradictory meanings:
(Outside the US) – a quadrilateral with one pair of parallel sides, known in the US as a trapezoid.
(In the US) – a quadrilateral with no parallel sides (a shape known elsewhere as a general irregular quadrilateral).
But yes, it is a vast dispute whether parallelograms are trapezoids; I am marginally upset by the suggestion in PARCC that they are. That said, editorializing ("horribly misguided") has no place in legitimate quiz bowl questions, and the clue as a whole is highly inefficient--no one can have any idea what that clue is meant to be saying until at least the phrase "special case" and most likely "trapezoid".
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