The Quizbowl Resource Center

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 12:47 pm**

This is your discussion thread for specific questions from the 2020 Division I SCT.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:00 pm**

Can I see the tossup on learning from, I think, Packet 9?

That question seemed to have a questionable answerline/pronoun combination that made it frustrating to play. In game, it seemed like the intent was to name machine learning methods, and then have the player say "machine learning". However, it seemed like answers of "optimization", "classification", or "regression" could have been equally valid.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:37 pm**

2020 DI SCT round 9 wrote:An "online" variant of this process may be implemented using Nick Littlestone's Winnow algorithm, which introduced multiplicative updates to the weights of experts. Linear classifiers based on this process include the support-vector machine and Frank Rosenblatt's (*) perceptron. Depending on whether it uses labeled training data, this process may be termed "supervised" or "unsupervised." For 10 points—name this process by which computer systems improve without explicit instruction.

answer: machine learning (accept ML; accept computer learning; before "data," accept online learning or supervised learning)

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:23 pm**

Important Bird Area wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:37 pm
2020 DI SCT round 9 wrote:An "online" variant of this process may be implemented using Nick Littlestone's Winnow algorithm, which introduced multiplicative updates to the weights of experts. Linear classifiers based on this process include the support-vector machine and Frank Rosenblatt's (*) perceptron. Depending on whether it uses labeled training data, this process may be termed "supervised" or "unsupervised." For 10 points—name this process by which computer systems improve without explicit instruction.

answer: machine learning (accept ML; accept computer learning; before "data," accept online learning or supervised learning)

I feel like every aspect of this question is deeply confusing. First, calling it a "process" as though there is a single way machine learning is done (rather than like, a field of techniques used to make machines learn) really made it seem as though this question wanted something more specific than machine learning; in general, this tossup did not distinguish the scope of the answerline at all. Second, the lead-in basically says that the process repeatedly "updates weights" - that's the foundation of machine learning and it is very confusing in real time that it would be clued in the leadin. Third, saying "linear classifiers based on this process" and then giving a discrete list of linear classifiers seems to imply that there are linear classifiers that don't use machine learning that people care about (which, as far as I can tell, there aren't). Finally, this seems to be missing lots of alternate answers, as Jonathen pointed out. Another huge answerline miss seems to be "training."

I guess this is a lot of work to single out one question, but this one really soured the taste of the entire set for me. I feel as though this was very obviously a bad idea, in that even people I've talked to who barely pay attention to computer science questions agree that this was a bad idea. Obviously, every set will have some bad tossups, but this felt beyond the pale of acceptability to me.

Other assorted thoughts:
The "shouting fire" tossup was a really cool idea, but we were prompted on "shouting fire in a crowded building" and had to say theater, even though the Italian Hall disaster (where Caleb buzzed) did not actually occur in a theater.

"Amahl's Mother" was a very confusing idea for a tossup - I'm skeptical that the base opera has been so thoroughly mined that there need to be Gatsby-esque common links like this one, and I can't imagine this tossup didn't just devolve into very confused last clue buzzer races in most rooms.

I think others have mentioned this, but the "Roberts Rules of Order" bonus felt very hard in comparison to the rest of the set.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:52 pm**

Karansebes Schnapps Vendor wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:23 pm I think others have mentioned this, but the "Roberts Rules of Order" bonus felt very hard in comparison to the rest of the set.

As the other team UMD was playing when this bonus was read, I agree. In my high school, we ostensibly used Robert's Rules in student council, and it was discussed that this was what we used in our meetings, but we didn't necessarily stick to them, so even though I was familiar with Robert's Rules, I wouldn't have been able to pull the "move the previous question" part. I think it was a good idea in theory, but I feel that one's knowledge of this bonus is probably largely dependent of what clubs you did in high school.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 4:40 pm**

jacke wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:52 pm
Karansebes Schnapps Vendor wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 3:23 pm I think others have mentioned this, but the "Roberts Rules of Order" bonus felt very hard in comparison to the rest of the set.
As the other team UMD was playing when this bonus was read, I agree. In my high school, we ostensibly used Robert's Rules in student council, and it was discussed that this was what we used in our meetings, but we didn't necessarily stick to them, so even though I was familiar with Robert's Rules, I wouldn't have been able to pull the "move the previous question" part. I think it was a good idea in theory, but I feel that one's knowledge of this bonus is probably largely dependent of what clubs you did in high school.

FWIW one of the players on one of the Boise State teams who didn't have many buzzes was all over this bonus in DII. Not to say that it was difficulty appropriate but was at least playing to some knowledge.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:10 pm**

Mike Bentley wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 4:40 pm FWIW one of the players on one of the Boise State teams who didn't have many buzzes was all over this bonus in DII. Not to say that it was difficulty appropriate but was at least playing to some knowledge.

Yeah, I'm not really sure what to think about the bonus. I guess I don't think it was "too hard," just that you almost certainly haven't encountered this content unless you did student council or student government. Model UN has its own rules that aren't Robert's rules of order, I believe, so I do think the use of Robert's rules specifically might be more limited. I truly mean no insult to UMD when I say this, but I will admit I was surprised when they didn't answer Robert's Rules of Order for the first bonus part (let it be known they beat us in that match). In hindsight, though, it does seem like one of those things you can't expect a general audience to get, I guess. Maybe as its own part in an overall bonus about parliamentary procedure or something, it would work. The basis for an entire bonus, though, I think it's questionable, unless someone can point me to a place you learn about Robert's Rules other than, like, your high school student council.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:16 pm**

jacke wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:10 pm
Mike Bentley wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 4:40 pm FWIW one of the players on one of the Boise State teams who didn't have many buzzes was all over this bonus in DII. Not to say that it was difficulty appropriate but was at least playing to some knowledge.
Yeah, I'm not really sure what to think about the bonus. I guess I don't think it was "too hard," just that you almost certainly haven't encountered this content unless you did student council or student government. Model UN has its own rules that aren't Robert's rules of order, I believe, so I do think the use of Robert's rules specifically might be more limited. I truly mean no insult to UMD when I say this, but I will admit I was surprised when they didn't answer Robert's Rules of Order for the first bonus part (let it be known they beat us in that match). In hindsight, though, it does seem like one of those things you can't expect a general audience to get, I guess. Maybe as its own part in an overall bonus about parliamentary procedure or something, it would work. The basis for an entire bonus, though, I think it's questionable, unless someone can point me to a place you learn about Robert's Rules other than, like, your high school student council.

I've personally never used them but have certainly learned about them in general reading. This seems like a fine enough subject to ask about in General Knowledge.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:39 pm**

jacke wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:10 pm
Mike Bentley wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 4:40 pm FWIW one of the players on one of the Boise State teams who didn't have many buzzes was all over this bonus in DII. Not to say that it was difficulty appropriate but was at least playing to some knowledge.
Yeah, I'm not really sure what to think about the bonus. I guess I don't think it was "too hard," just that you almost certainly haven't encountered this content unless you did student council or student government. Model UN has its own rules that aren't Robert's rules of order, I believe, so I do think the use of Robert's rules specifically might be more limited. I truly mean no insult to UMD when I say this, but I will admit I was surprised when they didn't answer Robert's Rules of Order for the first bonus part (let it be known they beat us in that match). In hindsight, though, it does seem like one of those things you can't expect a general audience to get, I guess. Maybe as its own part in an overall bonus about parliamentary procedure or something, it would work. The basis for an entire bonus, though, I think it's questionable, unless someone can point me to a place you learn about Robert's Rules other than, like, your high school student council.

I'm not entirely sure how a bonus can simultaneously be "not too hard" and have the first 10 points gated by doing a few specific activities in high school - just from what you said it seems fairly unlikely that 90% of teams would have actually heard of Robert's Rules of Order, let alone remember and correctly give its title. It makes perfect sense that some people will have a field day with this bonus (I don't really know how famous or important the other parts are, but I could buy someone into parli pro knowing it all, especially since I have no idea what the DII version looked like) but my claim that it is "too hard" is borne from the fact that the easy part here is pretty non-trivial/specialized knowledge. Jacob pointed out in the other thread that this bonus in particular really conflicted with other easy parts in the set, including the bonuses immediately adjacent to it.

(as an unimportant aside, we were playing Rutgers when we got this bonus, and we 10'd it - an old hs friend who did FBLA's parlipro event and I had a gag where he read me robert's rules of order to fall asleep when we were at conferences together so I'd have been very sad if we missed it)

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:43 pm**

In addition to the comments mentioned above about the Italian Hall tossup, the clue itself was very confusing because it implied that "this action" caused the people's deaths, and the people actually died because of a stampede triggered by shouting fire, but that's a causal chain that wasn't made clear by the wording. We couldn't buzz on this clue because of this, and it ended up costing us a game which came down to it as tossup #22.

The tossup on "hydrogen" that referred to it as "this substance" had a clue that Rafael, Noah, and I felt was ambiguously worded, referring to the "production of the 21 centimeter line in this substance." I gave an answer of "intergalactic medium" - I assume this doesn't fit all the clues, but I thought the clue was referring to matter that can be a source of the 21 centimeter line, not the hydrogen atoms itself. It's possible that saying "element" would have made the question too easy, but I think the clue could have been made clearer.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:52 pm**

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:43 pm In addition to the comments mentioned above about the Italian Hall tossup, the clue itself was very confusing because it implied that "this action" caused the people's deaths, and the people actually died because of a stampede triggered by shouting fire, but that's a causal chain that wasn't made clear by the wording. We couldn't buzz on this clue because of this, and it ended up costing us a game which came down to it as tossup #22.

The tossup on "hydrogen" that referred to it as "this substance" had a clue that Rafael, Noah, and I felt was ambiguously worded, referring to the "production of the 21 centimeter line in this substance." I gave an answer of "intergalactic medium" - I assume this doesn't fit all the clues, but I thought the clue was referring to matter that can be a source of the 21 centimeter line, not the hydrogen atoms itself. It's possible that saying "element" would have made the question too easy, but I think the clue could have been made clearer.

To add another point to the hydrogen thing, even if you bracket the fuzziness of using "substance" to refer to interstellar hydrogen, the first two clues in this tossup are pretty much the two most famous, well-known things about how inter-stellar gases/HII regions (incidentally, I'm fairly certain the first clue applied to literally any dust or gas in space) work and are used by astronomers. I was completely baffled those clues came first.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:44 pm**

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 5:43 pm The tossup on "hydrogen" that referred to it as "this substance" had a clue that Rafael, Noah, and I felt was ambiguously worded, referring to the "production of the 21 centimeter line in this substance." I gave an answer of "intergalactic medium" - I assume this doesn't fit all the clues, but I thought the clue was referring to matter that can be a source of the 21 centimeter line, not the hydrogen atoms itself. It's possible that saying "element" would have made the question too easy, but I think the clue could have been made clearer.

Hard agree here. And I have 6563 Å burned into my retinas as H-alpha.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:47 pm**

Can I see the exact wording of the "wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia" bonus part? From what I heard, the question said something along the lines of "During this event, Caeneus died..." I answered with Centauromachy, which was neither accepted or prompted. If the question actually did say "during this event," I would argue that the Centauromachy should at least be prompted if not outright accepted, but I'm wondering if the question said "after this event." It's also entirely possible there were other parts of the bonus that I did not catch properly.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 8:35 pm**

AGoodMan wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:47 pm Can I see the exact wording of the "wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia" bonus part? From what I heard, the question said something along the lines of "During this event, Caeneus died..." I answered with Centauromachy, which was neither accepted or prompted. If the question actually did say "during this event," I would argue that the Centauromachy should at least be prompted if not outright accepted, but I'm wondering if the question said "after this event." It's also entirely possible there were other parts of the bonus that I did not catch properly.

2020 DI SCT round 2 wrote:A guest at this event named Caeneus was crushed into the Earth by rocks and trees when he proved otherwise invulnerable. For 10 points each—

A. Identify this event centering on a pair including Hippodamia, who was nearly abducted from it by an intoxicated Eurytion.

answer: (the) wedding (feast) of Pirithous ["pie"-RIH-thoh-uss] and Hippodamia (accept marriage or nuptials or other synonyms for "wedding"; accept Peirithous or Peirothoos for "Pirithous"; prompt on partial answers)

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 8:43 pm**

I forget which packet it was, but there was a bonus on Shintoism which mentioned the religion by during in the first part of the bonus, and then had the second answerline by "Shintoism" itself.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:12 pm**

I was very bewildered by the tossup linking Avengers: Endgame and the Beckett play, which was perhaps the worst idea for a tossup I have seen in a long time.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:17 pm**

100% Clean Comedian Dan Nainan wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:12 pm I was very bewildered by the tossup linking Avengers: Endgame and the Beckett play, which was perhaps the worst idea for a tossup I have seen in a long time.

I got this off the Beckett clues and didn't notice that that was what was going on; could the text of this be posted?

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:21 pm**

Can I see the tossup on Tyr? The lead-in to this seemed to be a very confusing clue about Thor's fishing expedition.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:21 pm**

2020 DI SCT round 1 wrote:A film with this title stars William Hurt as the philosopher Willie Esterhuyse and dramatizes the abolition of apartheid. A character in a play with this English title yawns in middle of asking "can there be misery loftier than mine?" That play with this English title opens with a character moving a (*) ladder back and forth between two windows. Clov and Hamm appear in a Samuel Beckett play titled after—for 10 points—what word that appears in the title of the franchise-concluding Avengers film?

answer: endgame (accept Endgame or Avengers: Endgame)

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:21 pm**

The DII tossup is the more explicitly Avengers: Endgame-clued question; the DI version seems fine to me.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:22 pm**

2020 DI SCT round 6 wrote:In one poem, a husband of Hrodr who is said to be this god's father catches two whales before cutting a fishing line baited with an ox's head. This god meets his 900-headed grandmother while attempting to steal an enormous cauldron from Hymir. At Ragnarok, this god will kill and be killed by the blood-stained dog (*) Garm. He suffered a major injury while helping to trick a monstrous son of Loki. For 10 points—name this Norse god whose hand was bitten off during the binding of the wolf Fenrir.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:46 pm**

This tossup provides another piece of evidence why the 2-second rule really isn't compatible with the clues NAQT is often using:

SCT wrote:In one poem, a husband of Hrodr who is said to be this god's father catches two whales before cutting a fishing line baited with an ox's head.

This clue was very hard to parse in-game - it's about Hymir I take it, but the thought process required to get to the answer seems very complicated: you have to make the jump from "OK, this is talking about Thor fishing with Hymir and catching the Midgard serpent" -> "OK, so it's Hymir who cuts the line" -> "Who is Hymir the father of?" -> "Hymir is the father of Tyr" -> "say Tyr as the answer." That seems like an awful lot to ask for a player to parse, particularly when they only have two seconds to answer after buzzing in. Even if a player has 5 seconds to answer the tossup, this clue seems really non-ideal to me because it's not about Tyr at all, it's just finding a way of asking about Tyr in a story that's much more directly linked to other figures, such as Thor and the Midgard Serpent.

Unrelatedly, the tossup on Penelope putting Eurycleia in power struck me as extremely, extremely generous and played out as a four-way buzzer race in the finals against our B team. I feel like this episode is extremely well known?

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:22 pm**

SCT wrote:In one poem, a husband of Hrodr who is said to be this god's father catches two whales before cutting a fishing line baited with an ox's head.

Will wrote:this clue seems really non-ideal to me because it's not about Tyr at all, it's just finding a way of asking about Tyr in a story that's much more directly linked to other figures, such as Thor and the Midgard Serpent.

Yeah, this is exactly the issue that I had with this clue. It's too alienated from its actual substance, which is that the Hymiskvida says that Hymir is the father of Tyr.

I think a lot of tossups on minor Norse deities select really tangential clues like this, because there are not very many good clues. Norse myth should be written on other types of answer-lines more often.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:35 pm**

Cheynem wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:21 pm The DII tossup is the more explicitly Avengers: Endgame-clued question; the DI version seems fine to me.

Why ask about a popular movie appropriate for the trash distribution and a work of Irish literature in the same question? Adding this giveaway just turns it into a buzzer race between most teams if neither of them know anything about Beckett's Endgame. In my opinion a dead tossup is much better than this.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:56 pm**

I read through the science in this set and have thoughts on two questions:

tossup on "three" in math: the object clued in the Hopf fibration and Poincare conjecture clues is a 3-sphere topologically, but it's considered a 4-sphere geometrically (as it is a hypersphere embedded in 4D euclidean space). Although Hopf and Poincare are topological concepts and both usually call them 3-spheres, I still think I would have been confused on what to answer with if I played this question. I also think that saying "the sphere of this many dimensions" seems to dissuade answers with 3 for being too obvious. I wonder if anyone else was thrown off by this too.

tossup on "molecular oxygen": diatomic oxygen gas is not considered a compound, as it does not contain two or more distinct elements. This is something NAQT (including myself in the past) seems to consistently get wrong.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:56 pm**

100% Clean Comedian Dan Nainan wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:35 pm
Cheynem wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:21 pm The DII tossup is the more explicitly Avengers: Endgame-clued question; the DI version seems fine to me.
Why ask about a popular movie appropriate for the trash distribution and a work of Irish literature in the same question? Adding this giveaway just turns it into a buzzer race between most teams if neither of them know anything about Beckett's Endgame. In my opinion a dead tossup is much better than this.

mixed impure academic is a great category and this tossup brought me joy

I'm not saying that to flame Chandler or anything, but this is a feedback thread and my feedback is "questions like this are excellent and NAQT should continue writing more than zero of them"

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:57 pm**

Vinjance wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:56 pm I read through the science in this set and have thoughts on two questions:

tossup on "three" in math: the object clued in the Hopf fibration and Poincare conjecture clues is a 3-sphere topologically, but it's considered a 4-sphere geometrically (as it is a hypersphere embedded in 4D euclidean space).

For what it's worth, this ambiguity also prevented myself (and I think Rafael) from buzzing.

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 11:00 pm**

CPiGuy wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:56 pm
100% Clean Comedian Dan Nainan wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:35 pm
Cheynem wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:21 pm The DII tossup is the more explicitly Avengers: Endgame-clued question; the DI version seems fine to me.
Why ask about a popular movie appropriate for the trash distribution and a work of Irish literature in the same question? Adding this giveaway just turns it into a buzzer race between most teams if neither of them know anything about Beckett's Endgame. In my opinion a dead tossup is much better than this.
mixed impure academic is a great category and this tossup brought me joy

I'm not saying that to flame Chandler or anything, but this is a feedback thread and my feedback is "questions like this are excellent and NAQT should continue writing more than zero of them"

Just to add my input on mixed questions as a whole, I generally enjoy mixed academic questions as I think many different humanities disciplines (especially) can be weaved together well in individual questions. I'm just not a fan of mixing trash and academic content, which in this example has no relationship other than "both of these things are named Endgame."

Posted: **Sun Feb 09, 2020 11:16 pm**

Not sure this is the right thread for this, but having a Poe bonus in round one (Gold Bug), a Poe TU in round two (angels), and a Poe mention in round three (in a bonus I don't recall) seems like a bit much.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:02 am**

I believe (maybe I'm misremembering?) that Claes Oldenburg was mentioned in both the Minnesota bonus part and tossed up later? If true, this was really confusing to me, but I'm not 100% sure this is what actually happened.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:26 am**

Karansebes Schnapps Vendor wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:02 am I believe (maybe I'm misremembering?) that Claes Oldenburg was mentioned in both the Minnesota bonus part and tossed up later? If true, this was really confusing to me, but I'm not 100% sure this is what actually happened.

I think his Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture in front of the Walker Art Center was mentioned in the bonus although he wasn't named. Still, probably not the best idea to mention one of his works a few rounds before he's tossed up.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 3:32 am**

Vinjance wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:56 pm tossup on "three" in math: the object clued in the Hopf fibration and Poincare conjecture clues is a 3-sphere topologically, but it's considered a 4-sphere geometrically (as it is a hypersphere embedded in 4D euclidean space). Although Hopf and Poincare are topological concepts and both usually call them 3-spheres, I still think I would have been confused on what to answer with if I played this question. I also think that saying "the sphere of this many dimensions" seems to dissuade answers with 3 for being too obvious. I wonder if anyone else was thrown off by this too.

What was the specific phrasing in the question? I don't think there's any good argument for considering the 3-sphere a "sphere of four dimensions." While a 3-sphere can be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space, that is not an argument for calling it a sphere of four dimensions. For instance, 3-dimensional Euclidean space can be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space, but no one would call it "Euclidean space of four dimensions." The dimension of a space (such as a sphere) is a property of the space alone, not of spaces that the space may be mapped to. I think the functional ambiguity comes from the (bad) quiz bowl precedent of cluing the 3-sphere in tossups on 4.

Slightly relatedly, the tossup on "rings" used "this type of set" as an indicator, which is not really accurate. A ring is a set AND two operations (with certain properties). A better indicator would be "structure."

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 10:35 am**

justinfrench1728 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 3:32 am
Vinjance wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:56 pm tossup on "three" in math: the object clued in the Hopf fibration and Poincare conjecture clues is a 3-sphere topologically, but it's considered a 4-sphere geometrically (as it is a hypersphere embedded in 4D euclidean space). Although Hopf and Poincare are topological concepts and both usually call them 3-spheres, I still think I would have been confused on what to answer with if I played this question. I also think that saying "the sphere of this many dimensions" seems to dissuade answers with 3 for being too obvious. I wonder if anyone else was thrown off by this too.
What was the specific phrasing in the question? I don't think there's any good argument for considering the 3-sphere a "sphere of four dimensions." While a 3-sphere can be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space, that is not an argument for calling it a sphere of four dimensions. For instance, 3-dimensional Euclidean space can be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space, but no one would call it "Euclidean space of four dimensions." The dimension of a space (such as a sphere) is a property of the space alone, not of spaces that the space may be mapped to. I think the functional ambiguity comes from the (bad) quiz bowl precedent of cluing the 3-sphere in tossups on 4.

Slightly relatedly, the tossup on "rings" used "this type of set" as an indicator, which is not really accurate. A ring is a set AND two operations (with certain properties). A better indicator would be "structure."

I have to agree here. I didn't play this tossup, but the Hopf fibration and Poincare conjecture are very definitively about 3-spheres. The argument that sphere dimension is commonly confused with embedded dimension should not mean that these clues are themselves bad. Indeed, I would think that these clues allow players with more substantial knowledge of topology to buzz with certainty over players who are only tangentially aware of these topics.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 11:01 am**

I would like to see the tossups on Sholokov, the Fool from Lear, and "scholar" please.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:00 pm**

2020 DI SCT round 2 wrote:This author wrote about a man who escapes a Nazi POW camp with a briefcase full of blueprints, then adopts the orphan Vanya after his wife Irina is killed, in his short story "Fate of a Man." Geir Kjetsaa's 1976 computer study purported to show that this man did not plagiarize (*) Fyodor Kryukov for a novel in which Daria drowns herself rather than live with syphilis and Aksinia's death concludes the story of the Cossack Gregor Melekhov. For 10 points—name this author of And Quiet Flows the Don.

answer: Mikhail (Aleksandrovich) Sholokhov

2020 DI SCT round 4 wrote:This character is first seen offering a man his coxcomb for "taking one's part that's out of favour." The steward Oswald is struck for chiding this character. This character is asked "who is it that can tell me who I am?" by his employer, whom he calls (*) "nuncle." In the final scene, the main character's mention of a hanging may refer to his daughter or to this character, who accompanies his employer and Kent to the heath. For 10 points—identify this unnamed character who serves King Lear.

answer: (King) Lear's Fool

2020 DI SCT round 7 wrote:This term titles all English translations of a novel that includes Wu Taibo's ancestral rites, written by Wu Jingzi. The anonymous author of The Plum in the Golden Vase is identified as a "scoffing" example of this kind of person from Lanling. A poem titled for a legendary person who abandoned this role at (*) Oxford says "thou waitest for the spark from heaven" and was based on a legend collected by Joseph Glanvill. For 10 points—Matthew Arnold wrote about what kind of "Gipsy"?

answer: scholar(s) (accept The Scholars or The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling or The Scholar-Gipsy; do not accept or prompt on putative synonyms of "scholar")

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:29 pm**

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:46 pm This tossup provides another piece of evidence why the 2-second rule really isn't compatible with the clues NAQT is often using:

SCT wrote:In one poem, a husband of Hrodr who is said to be this god's father catches two whales before cutting a fishing line baited with an ox's head.
This clue was very hard to parse in-game - it's about Hymir I take it, but the thought process required to get to the answer seems very complicated: you have to make the jump from "OK, this is talking about Thor fishing with Hymir and catching the Midgard serpent" -> "OK, so it's Hymir who cuts the line" -> "Who is Hymir the father of?" -> "Hymir is the father of Tyr" -> "say Tyr as the answer." That seems like an awful lot to ask for a player to parse, particularly when they only have two seconds to answer after buzzing in. Even if a player has 5 seconds to answer the tossup, this clue seems really non-ideal to me because it's not about Tyr at all, it's just finding a way of asking about Tyr in a story that's much more directly linked to other figures, such as Thor and the Midgard Serpent.

I will third this comment. I buzzed on this clue and didn't parse it correctly, mumbling out "Thor" for a neg.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:34 pm**

Can I see the Michael I Romanov tossup?

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 12:47 pm**

2020 DI SCT round 2 wrote:This monarch expelled the Saltykov family from his court after he learned that they poisoned his fiancee Maria. This person secured the release of his father from Polish captivity in the Truce of Deulino. Sweden recognized the legitimacy of this monarch in the Treaty of (*) Stolbovo, which ended the Ingrian War. This son of the patriarch Filaret and the nun Xenia gained power in 1613, ending the Time of Troubles. For 10 points—what tsar founded the Romanov dynasty?

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 3:49 pm**

Overall, my personal biases (losing by 5 points on trash bonuses, haha) aside, I think the set was decent for the most part.
A few thoughts:
I feel along with others that the tossup on machine learning was unclear exactly what the question was asking for. What does it mean by the support vector machine is based on the process of machine learning? A better way to frame that clue may have been "Techniques for this process include SVM, etc."
Also, what was up with the vertical line CS tossup? I would think the tossup should have explicitly mentioned "description acceptable" or else a player who knows what the tossup is referring to but doesn't know the exact name may be hesitant to buzz in and may lose points to another team who decides to "go for it". OTOH, though, a description acceptable note may be hinting that the actual name is too obscure, so may be giving away unwanted information.
Finally, I wonder what the exact answer line was and what alternatives would've been accepted for the "shouting fire" tossup

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 4:00 pm**

2020 DI SCT round 10 wrote:answer: shouting fire in a (crowded) theater (prompt on partial answers such as "shouting fire"; accept descriptive equivalents that refer to yelling the word fire and a theater)

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:08 pm**

Could I please see the tossup on "heritage speakers?" I was really frustrated by this tossup because I didn't know there was a specific term for these folks (though amusingly there was a poster about "heritage speakers" in the hallway) and I suspect this frustration wasn't unique. It also felt like the question was playing to very few people in the audience - I would be surprised if more than a third of teams converted this question, and it seemed like it was very possible to understand the substance of the clues and not be able to get points.

In general, I thought that the linguistics questions in this set were really hard and I wasn't sure whose knowledge base they were really aiming at.

I'd also like to see the tossup on Amahls mother, out of curiosity. I'm frankly not sure why this tossup needed to exist - my conversations with opera afficionados suggest the opera is not very important. Why not use these slots to ask jazz, or perhaps put opera singers here?

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:30 pm**

2020 DI SCT round 10 wrote:A Guadalupe Valdes paper is titled for these people's "profiles and possibilities." A 2008 Maria Polinsky paper attributes their knowledge of Spanish gender to incomplete acquisition. A paper by Joshua Fishman distinguishes between colonial, indigenous, and immigrant populations of them. By definition, these people are (*) fluent in a dominant language, in which they have formal training. For 10 points—name these people, distinguished from native speakers, who learn a minority language at home.

answer: heritage speakers (or heritage language learners; prompt on "bilinguals" or "multilinguals"; prompt on "migrants" before "immigrants"; prompt on "indigenous people" before "indigenous"; accept home-background speakers)

2020 DI SCT round 11 wrote:In one aria, this unnamed woman ponders whether other characters know "how to fill a courtyard with doves" or "how to milk a clover-fed goat." Rosemary Kuhlmann originated this role, who reminds a male character that he once claimed there was a "leopard with a woman's head." A page catches this woman attempting to steal gold before her child offers to give his crutch as a gift and is (*) miraculously healed. For 10 points—what character and her son receive "night visitors" in a Gian Carlo Menotti opera?

answer: Amahl's mother (accept answers indicating the mother of Amahl or the mother from Amahl and the Night Visitors)

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:51 pm**

Important Bird Area wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:30 pm
2020 DI SCT round 10 wrote:A Guadalupe Valdes paper is titled for these people's "profiles and possibilities." A 2008 Maria Polinsky paper attributes their knowledge of Spanish gender to incomplete acquisition. A paper by Joshua Fishman distinguishes between colonial, indigenous, and immigrant populations of them. By definition, these people are (*) fluent in a dominant language, in which they have formal training. For 10 points—name these people, distinguished from native speakers, who learn a minority language at home.

answer: heritage speakers (or heritage language learners; prompt on "bilinguals" or "multilinguals"; prompt on "migrants" before "immigrants"; prompt on "indigenous people" before "indigenous"; accept home-background speakers)

2020 DI SCT round 11 wrote:In one aria, this unnamed woman ponders whether other characters know "how to fill a courtyard with doves" or "how to milk a clover-fed goat." Rosemary Kuhlmann originated this role, who reminds a male character that he once claimed there was a "leopard with a woman's head." A page catches this woman attempting to steal gold before her child offers to give his crutch as a gift and is (*) miraculously healed. For 10 points—what character and her son receive "night visitors" in a Gian Carlo Menotti opera?

answer: Amahl's mother (accept answers indicating the mother of Amahl or the mother from Amahl and the Night Visitors)

Is there a reason why a linguistics tossup includes three paper clues and then jumps straight to a definition? This tossup seems unreasonably hard and confusing. My linguistics major teammate was incredibly confused by this tossup and by some of the randomly hard linguistics hard parts.

Likewise, I can't imagine this Amahl's mother tossup would withstand scrutiny if it was playtested like, you know, any modern quizbowl set would do especially before hugely important qualifying tournaments. I'll have more to say later, but between these questions, the "learning" tossup that was among the worst I have ever heard, the tossup on "adventure" in video games that was incredibly confusing, this set would have greatly benefited from playtesting. I don't know why these crappy tossups have to remain in the set. At this level, you could probably just, I don't know, tossup Amahl and the Night Visitors or "Support Vector Machines" or "Sonic Adventure" and avoid all this confusion.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 7:25 pm**

Yeah, I'll go a step further than Harris and say that this "heritage speakers" tossup is just bad. The first clue is LITERALLY just a title drop of a paper I suspect almost nobody in the field has read, and doesn't give you any inkling about why you'd care about it. The second clue, which is also on a paper I suspect nobody in the field has read, kind of also gives the game away - suggesting that this is some kind of person who probably isn't a conventional fluent Spanish speaker, so you really only have a couple of options. The third clue is also about work that seems to be notable, but again is probably way above the field's knowledge. Then you get to a basic definition and a giveaway, and the answer is something that I suspect is not getting well converted.

This tossup on Amahl's mother also is a really questionable choice - I guess you can defend the opera's importance as a cultural artifact, but even then, it seems like an unnecessarily deep cut for this difficulty level. What's more egregious to me though is that this question has no actual music clues, only a bunch of plot clues and aria titles. If it were one question that'd be fine, but I got the impression that most of the rest of the set's opera questions were the same, and really felt a lot more like bad early-2010s era opera questions that rewarded reading plot summaries as opposed to more modern questions that test a wider range of material, including music knowledge, performance history, set design, etc. in addition to perhaps more "accessible" titles and character names. Contrasting these opera questions with the (easy, but well-executed) music questions draws a pretty stark contrast.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 7:29 pm**

Important Bird Area wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:30 pm
2020 DI SCT round 10 wrote:A Guadalupe Valdes paper is titled for these people's "profiles and possibilities." A 2008 Maria Polinsky paper attributes their knowledge of Spanish gender to incomplete acquisition. A paper by Joshua Fishman distinguishes between colonial, indigenous, and immigrant populations of them. By definition, these people are (*) fluent in a dominant language, in which they have formal training. For 10 points—name these people, distinguished from native speakers, who learn a minority language at home.

answer: heritage speakers (or heritage language learners; prompt on "bilinguals" or "multilinguals"; prompt on "migrants" before "immigrants"; prompt on "indigenous people" before "indigenous"; accept home-background speakers)

We read this on the car ride back and it seemed confusing that, given the fact that the question itself contrasts them with "native speakers," that "non-native speakers" would not be at least prompted.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:13 pm**

Progcon wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:51 pm At this level, you could probably just, I don't know, tossup Amahl and the Night Visitors or "Support Vector Machines" or "Sonic Adventure" and avoid all this confusion.

I second this point. It seems unnecessarily ambitious for the writers to write NAQT-length tossups on such convoluted answerlines as "Amahl's mother", especially below ICT level. In a short tossup there is little time for the player to figure out what's going on if the answerline is more "out-of-the-box" than what players expect.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:26 pm**

warum wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:13 pm
Progcon wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:51 pm At this level, you could probably just, I don't know, tossup Amahl and the Night Visitors or "Support Vector Machines" or "Sonic Adventure" and avoid all this confusion.
I second this point. It seems unnecessarily ambitious for the writers to write NAQT-length tossups on such convoluted answerlines as "Amahl's mother", especially below ICT level. In a short tossup there is little time for the player to figure out what's going on if the answerline is more "out-of-the-box" than what players expect.

I'm not sure I quite agree on this point - in fact I think "out-of-the-box" answers are what make NAQT really exciting, like the questions on daggers in Macbeth and the curse of King Tut. I'd personally like to see more of those than a cut at the plot of an opera that's mainly important, I think, for its historical value.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:40 pm**

Could I see the philosophy tossup on I think "essence"? Cluing οὐσία was kind of confusing (and neg-prompting) for all the Greek speakers on my team since it is pretty hard to define (but I also have no idea what the philosophical content was talking about).

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:52 pm**

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:26 pm
warum wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:13 pm
Progcon wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:51 pm At this level, you could probably just, I don't know, tossup Amahl and the Night Visitors or "Support Vector Machines" or "Sonic Adventure" and avoid all this confusion.
I second this point. It seems unnecessarily ambitious for the writers to write NAQT-length tossups on such convoluted answerlines as "Amahl's mother", especially below ICT level. In a short tossup there is little time for the player to figure out what's going on if the answerline is more "out-of-the-box" than what players expect.
I'm not sure I quite agree on this point - in fact I think "out-of-the-box" answers are what make NAQT really exciting, like the questions on daggers in Macbeth and the curse of King Tut. I'd personally like to see more of those than a cut at the plot of an opera that's mainly important, I think, for its historical value.

My post was unclear about what sort of answerlines I was criticizing. I completely agree with you, and would make a distinction between things like the dagger in Macbeth that maybe haven't been asked about before but are important and interesting to many quizbowlers, versus things like "Amahl's mother" or the word "adventure." The latter seem like attempts to make a question less straightforward as a way of making it more difficult, instead of coming up with harder clues for a more commonplace answerline.

Posted: **Mon Feb 10, 2020 10:02 pm**

I could definitely believe that heritage speakers is just too hard to work at SCT, but I tried to choose the clues very carefully. The Valdes paper is the seminal work on the topic that provides the standard definition (and indeed the clue doesn't tell you why it's important, but that's due to the character limit). For the Polinsky and Fishman papers, I certainly wasn't expecting players to have read them, but rather to be able to figure out what's going on if they know about the concept of incomplete acquisition or about the types of populations who are likely to be heritage speakers.

Incidentally, I also wrote the machine learning tossup. I was careful to choose clues that pointed specifically to the phrase "machine learning" (including a lead-in saying it was a two-word phrase and describing its context of coinage), but it seems those were changed in editing.

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