2023 ACF Fall Discussion

[Sean]

This is the discussion thread for 2023 ACF Fall. In addition to asking for feedback, I’d like to thank everyone who had a hand in producing and playing the set, starting with the many tournament directors and staffers who went out of their way this weekend. Their extra work in implementing MODAQ for scorekeeping was especially appreciated considering the various issues that cropped up throughout Saturday.

Prior to this weekend, the people who likely put in the most hours to ensure there was a set to play are the subject editors. Those editors and their respective subjects included:

Eric Chang - Visual Fine Arts, Other Fine Arts
Jeffrey Fung - Chemistry, European Literature
Shourjo Ganguli - American, British, and World Literature
Alexandra Hardwick - European History
Kevin Jiang - Other Science, Social Science, Current Events
Evan Knox - American History, Pop Culture
Lalit Maharjan - Other History
Eric Mukherjee - Physics
Richard Niu - Auditory Fine Arts
Quynh Phung - World History, Religion, Philosophy
Munir Siddiqui - Biology, Mythology, Geography

In particular, I’ll highlight the contributions of Alexandra Hardwick and Eric Mukherjee as essential. Their work extended far beyond the scope of their own categories and without them there would’ve been much less of a set to play.

Besides editors’ questions, freelancer contributions were crucial in helping us finish the set on time. Angela Lin, Caroline Mao, Ganon Evans, Adam Silverman, Andrew Hart, Ben Chapman, Bryanna Shao, Zach Foster, and Chandler West all helped fill in gaps with last-minute questions. Beyond freelancing, Chandler also worked in an advisory role alongside Ophir Lifshitz. And in the final stages of set production, the proofreading of Ganon, Bryanna, and David Bass helped with fixing numerous mistakes and inconsistencies in questions.

In no particular order, the following playtesters also provided significant feedback in the mid-to-late stages of set production: Grant Peet, Mitch McCullar, Ryan Rosenberg, Annabelle Yang, Hasna Karim, Justin Duffy, Jacob Egol, Walter Zhang, Iain Carpenter, and Andrew Wang. With the final playtesting sessions getting pushed and compressed later than we would've liked, playtesters' willingness to be flexible and provide insight however they could was a very welcome boon.

Beyond those acknowledgements, I'll ask that, in addition to posting on discord, people relay any and all feedback for the set here. This includes comments on specific questions or on how the set played overall. With the Fall team taking on almost an entirely new set of editors each year, leaving feedback for posterity plays a vital role in guiding future iterations, so please do voice your opinions!

[Restitutor27]

18. Currencies used by this empire include the silver Siglo and the gold Daric. This empire was the first to create
travelers’ inns called caravanserai, where they were placed along a 1,677 mile-long Royal Road that began at the
town of Susa. This empire was the first to divide its territory into provinces run by satraps, a structure that was
retained by the Seleucids. The Apadana palace at this empire’s capital city depicts its unification with the Medes. At
its height in the 400s BC, this empire stretched from India in the East to Libya in the West. Cambyses II and Xerxes
the Great were rulers of, for 10 points, what ancient empire centered in the Iranian plateau?
ANSWER: Persian Empire [or the First Persian Empire; or Achaemenid Persian Empire]
<Other History>

I am sure there is much more to say about this than I am really qualified to, but will note that this tossup in packet E has many clues that are either outright erroneous or are such large oversimplications that they become inaccurate.

I haven't been able to find any sources for the term caravanserai being used in the Achaemenid period (the term is used mostly for inns along the Silk Road but not exclusively) and the Encyclopaedia Iranica gives kārvān-sarāy-e šāh-ʿabbāsī as a term instituted by Abbas I of the Safavid Empire, being "applied indiscriminately to all caravansaries built between the late 10th/16th and 13th/19th centuries". This also makes it sound like the Achaemenids were the first to ever build rest stops along roads. The term σταθμοί used by Herodotus seems to have been translated as "caravanserai" in a number of online sources for no real reason, with the literal translation being more of a "standing-place" or less literally a "stop".

The Royal Road account comes only from Herodotus (5.52) and the way it is described on Wikipedia does not really take into account the wider road network the route from Susa to Sardis would have been a part of - see page 32 of this for a number of sources. (admittedly I have done the exact same thing myself while writing TUs before so again am not really in a position to say much, but it's knowledge gained for the qb community I suppose)

This doesn't make a difference to the tossup itself but Persepolis is only one of several major cities in the Achaemenid empire along with e.g. Susa, Pasargadae, Sardis, Ecbatana so it is probably best to not make it sound like it was *the* definitive capital city.

The Apadana reliefs at Persepolis show 23 delegations bringing tribute, and there appears to be absolutely nothing at all indicating a depiction of "Persians unifying with Medes" - maybe this clue was found while looking at the term Mede being used to indicate Persians in some Greek sources? The existence of a historical "empire" ruled by the Medes has also been much debated recently (see page 338 of this for an outline of a 2001 conference and several more recent publications).

[10m] Xenophon wrote a partly fictional biography of this ruler who lived in the 500s BC. An inscribed cylinder
created under this Persian ruler was referred to as an early “charter of human rights.”
ANSWER: Cyrus the Great [or Cyrus II of Persia or Cyrus the Elder or Kurus; accept Cyrus Cylinder; prompt on
“Cyropaedia”]

The "charter of human rights" comes from Mohammed Reza Pahlavi making the statement in a nationalistic context and essentially all academic sources characterise this as inaccurate and anachronistic (the text on the cylinder is not long at all and can be read here) so ideally I would pick another clue.

With that out of the way I modded the UK site of ACF Fall this year, and would like to make the writers aware the teams seemed to really enjoy the set - the general difficulty overall seemed fairly well balanced to me, besides a couple of things that felt very hard for this level like the Cantor middle thirds clue (which I only encountered incidentally, and outside of the actual course content, in 3 years of a maths degree and at "novice" level I expect most teams if they get it will be getting it just by guessing a set theorist).

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

that's rough innit

[Cheynem]

Regarding the Cyrus Cylinder clue, I think the wording could have been more specific but there's nothing really wrong there. It has been referred to in that way, although for nationalistic purposes. The question was not attempting to assert it actually was such a charter.

[Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone]

Regarding the Cyrus Cylinder clue, I think the wording could have been more specific but there's nothing really wrong there. It has been referred to in that way, although for nationalistic purposes. The question was not attempting to assert it actually was such a charter.

Yeah, this is basically ok, though of course players can't hear the quotation marks - and personally I'd like something that hints that this is a modern statement, rather than anything contemporary.

18. Currencies used by this empire include the silver Siglo and the gold Daric. This empire was the first to create
travelers’ inns called caravanserai, where they were placed along a 1,677 mile-long Royal Road that began at the
town of Susa. This empire was the first to divide its territory into provinces run by satraps, a structure that was
retained by the Seleucids. The Apadana palace at this empire’s capital city depicts its unification with the Medes. At
its height in the 400s BC, this empire stretched from India in the East to Libya in the West. Cambyses II and Xerxes
the Great were rulers of, for 10 points, what ancient empire centered in the Iranian plateau?
ANSWER: Persian Empire [or the First Persian Empire; or Achaemenid Persian Empire]
<Other History>

This, on the other hand, is a long way from ok. It's a shame to be here again dealing with some very poor Achaemenid history.

1. The silver coins (Currency is the wrong choice of word here, there's a whole Achaemenid currency system which is comprised of different types of coins) are Sigloi.
2. As Abigail has pointed out, there's no good academic source that I've ever read that claims that the Achaemenids created caravanserai, whatever lots of poor quality websites like to claim - there are zero mentions of the word in Briant's From Cyrus to Alexander, and 2 hits in the 1176 pages of the Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire published a couple of years ago - one is a map showing the Medieval Caravanserai built at Pasargadae, the other is a gloriously uncertain statement from one of the Bactrian documents:

According to one possible interpretation of another written order (A2), Bagavant and troops under his command may have been employed for maintenance works on a “house,” possibly a desert caravanserai, of Akhvamazda’s or for the delivery of vinegar (Naveh and Shaked 2012: p. 81; the crucial Aramaic term, ḥl’, is ambiguous in consonantal writing and can mean “sand,” /ḥāl/, or “vinegar,” /ḥall/).

3. As I wrote last time, there was no single Royal Road, but an entire network of routes crossing the empire.
(4. A fair statement, though the Seleucids did not take over the satrapal system via Alexander unchanged)
5. There was no single Achaemenid capital - the Great King moved between multiple palaces in a semi-regular pattern - Susa, Persepolis, Pasargadae, Ecbatana, Babylon (Athenaeus basically had it right)
6. The Apadana palace in no way "depicts its unification with the Medes". The Medes had a very prominent position in the empire, but they were always ultimately subordinate to the Persians -

The position of the Medes is certainly remarkable. It is likely that after the conquest of Ecbatana Media retained special prestige among the conquered countries, perhaps because of ancient political and cultural links between Persians and Medes. But at the same time it is clear that our perspective is somewhat skewed because of propaganda. For example, the marriage between Cyrus and Amytis, daughter of Astyages, recorded by Ctesias, is not a verified fact. It would thus be excessive to speak of a Persian-Median joint sovereignty. All of the ancient authors acclaim Cyrus as the one who uprooted ruling power from the Medes in order to transfer it to the Persians. The former are the vanquished, the latter the victors

More even than some other areas of ancient history, the internet is filled with about the Persian Empire, please be wary and if possible cross-check with academic sources.

[bkmcavoybickford]

A thought experiment used to criticize this theory considers an unemployed chemist named George. The“average” version of this theory is subject to Parfit’s mere addition paradox. A two-level version of this theory created by R. M. Hare posits a threshold of critical thinking to switch between its “act” and “rule” forms. One advocate of this theory wrote An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which described a felicific calculus in which intensity and duration of pleasure is considered. For 10 points, name this ethical philosophy advocated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which emphasizes the greatest good for the greatest number.
ANSWER: utilitarianism [or consequentialism; accept average utilitarianism or act utilitarianism or rule utilitarianism]

My understanding is that the mere addition paradox applies to any theory that involves aggregating the interests of a population in some way. It doesn't just apply to utilitarianism; it's somewhat unclear what it means for a theory to be "subject to" a paradox, but the mere addition paradox can be treated as an argument against either average or total views of population ethics. I'm pretty sure population ethics would be a more correct answer given this clue.

[joshxu]

As a staffer, I gathered that all teams in my room generally enjoyed this set. Just a couple observations from my experience:

18. If the double integral of this function composed with some arbitrary function is finite, then the order of iterated integration can be changed via Fubini’s theorem. In Euclidean space, the taxicab distance between two points equals the sum of this function applied to each coordinatewise difference between the points. The modulus of a complex number is found by applying this function. Applying this function is equivalent to taking the square root of the square of each input. This function negates negative numbers, but does not change non-negative numbers. For 10 points, name this function with a V-shaped graph that is denoted with two vertical bars.
ANSWER: absolute value [accept l-1 norm; prompt on magnitude; prompt on norm; prompt on modulus]
<Other Science>

A player in my room buzzed on the complex number clue and successively answered with magnitude and norm, but had no idea what the prompt was looking for. The first few sentences of this tossup generally seem very difficult to parse at game speed, making it especially difficult to figure out which of the many functions used to characterize distance is desired.

This doesn't necessarily imply any issue with the set, but my room had an unusually high frequency of teams 20ing bonuses with the easy and hard parts, 20ing with the medium and hard parts, and 10ing with only the medium part.