SEAP Quiz 2004

The SEAP Quiz 2004 was held on Saturday the 25th September in Persistent Systems' Dewang Mehta Auditorium. 24 Teams turned up, something of a disappointment, but probably attributable to the fact that the quiz was only open to SEAP member companies (Don't blame the QM for this, he had no say in it).

Finalists:

Parimal Puranik and C. Phani (Calsoft)
Srihari Suthamally and Sudarshan Purohit (Persistent)
Manish Manke and Kartik Jayaraman (Geometric)
Vaidyanathan K.A. and Venkata Kiran G.P. (Kanbay)
Niranjan Tulpule and Satwik Hebbar (Calsoft)
Siddharth Madhusudan and Parag Shetye (Synechron)

The prelims were quite close with the first four placers separetd by a point apiece. Two Calsoft teams - Niranjan and Satwik, and Uma Chingunde and Vaibhav Nirargi - tied, and because of the only-two-teams-from-the-same-company cap for the finals had to play off in a tie breaker for the fifth spot. As if that wasn't enough there was a three way tie for the sixth spot. One team, Don Ksare (Spelling?) and Saurav Lenka (Kanbay) was eliminated because of a lower score on the starred questions, which still left Synechron and another Kanbay team Paresh Navalakha and L. Subramanian to face off in the tie break. Three tie-break questions proved insufficient and the tie break went to sudden death. Synechron made it through by virtue of knowing that "Fidelio" was Beethoven's only Opera.

The finals were an 8 round Infinite Rebounds affair, with 7 "Classic" rounds and 1 "Stage Two" (in Bangalore quizzing parlance). Your correspondent, being actively involved in the organizing will leave it to others to comment on the quality of the questions; slightly more than 60% were answered. It was quite close till the end: On the last question (which as it happened nobody got), any one of four teams could have won with 10 points. True to form the two Calsoft teams tied for second place, necessitating another tie break. Three tie break questions and they were still tied, so another dose of sudden death was called for. On the second question Niranjan and Satwik won thanks to a greater familiarity with Richard Stallman's alter ego of St. IGNUcious of the church of Emacs.

Final Scores and Placings:

Srihari Suthamally and Sudarshan Purohit (Persistent) 65 Winners
Niranjan Tulpule and Satwik Hebbar (Calsoft) 60 Runners Up
Parimal Puranik and C. Phani (Calsoft) 60
Siddharth Madhusudan and Parag Shetye (Synechron) 55
Manish Manke and Kartik Jayaraman (Geometric) 30
Vaidyanathan K.A. and Venkata Kiran G.P. (Kanbay) 30

:: One of the organisers

In the past few weeks...

Some of the quizzes that one would wish he/she had not attended, but though deserve some mention were the 3 ones in AISSMS. It seems, a new quizzing pattern (lets call it AISSMS pattern) has emerged. Consider these:-

1. Direct & Pass (though one of them had a 'new' system called 'Infinite Remote').
2. A round where one team member selects a topic for his partner. If unanswered, the question passes not to the teams, but to the first partner.
3. Audio-visuals provided 'live' by the college talents.
4. Trailing teams get knocked out after every 2 rounds.
5. The finale is between 2 teams following the pattern of CNBC 'The Challenge'.

Other quizzes that took place were Vedant and the TVS Tyres SmarTest. In all of them, the drawbacks of D&P showed - nastily. Major upsets and major cribs and frustrations. The quality of questions is becoming a secondary issue. Waiting for a good quiz with IR.

TVS Tyres SmarTest

First the results:-

1st: FC - Kunal & Ulka

2nd: VIT - Ganesh & Kunal

3rd: VIT - Siddharth & Salil

Other finalists: -

VIT: Anupam & Anand

SCOE: Mohit & Akshay

MESCOE: Aditya & Srinivas

Big prize money, 2 semifinals, decent questions, irritating QM, D & P, some weird unnecessary rounds. Comments plz.

The Quiz at BJ Medical College, Vedant

Venue: Mahatma Gandhi Auditorium, BJ Medical College, Pune.

Winners: Siddharth Dani & Salil Bijur (VIT) - Team F

Runners Up: (AFMC) - Team E

3rd Place: Kunal Sawardekar & Ulka Athale (FC) - Team C

4th Place: Sanket Anekar & Aditya Chandorkar (FC) - Team A

5th Place: Vivek Venkatraman + 1 (BJMC) - Team D

6th Place: Kunal Thakar & Ganesh Hegde (VIT) - Team B

Remarks:

- The Quizmaster, perhaps because of his not having been to too many quizzes, completely underestimated the level of the quizzers attending his quiz. Out of a total of 30 Elims questions, the cutoff was 24 with all stars. This same lack of faith in the participants manifested itself in the finals.

- The Khashaba Jadhav question featured in the Elims yet again.

- There were some very weird rounds. One was the RIM round, where all questions were based on their sponsors, Reliance India Mobile (eg, "What is the full form of CDMA?"). Another round involved choosing to answer either an easy or a difficult question. The difficult questions were marked +30-10, while the easy ones were a flat +10. The criteria for classification as either easy or difficult were however skewed, to put it mildly.

- The Quizmaster was one of that dying breed of quizzers who obstinately refuse to adopt Infinite Rebounds. The scoring system in place here was D&P 10+5.

- The last round was a Speed Round with 12 questions per team. Astonishingly for a 10+5 quiz, each Speed Round question carried 10 points. This obviously changed the course of the quiz completely, with some teams making spectacular gains and others falling behind.

- There were some nice, difficult, workable questions, which somehow all appeared in our Speed Round and totally sunk us.

- The audience was restive, and at times rowdy, perhaps because very few questions escaped the teams to pass on to them. The two audience prizes that were awarded were presented in style, with a member of the faculty being called to give them to the lucky winners up on stage.

- All in all, the quiz was an honest effort that somehow fell short of our expectations for such a big quiz. The Quizmaster was a decent chap, who just messed up in what was probably his first college quiz.

Analysis:

Team A: 3D, 1P, 7NA, (+30+0), 70SR = 135 Total.

Team B: 5D, 1P, 6NA, (-10-10), 90SR = 125 Total

Team C: 5D, 4P, 4NA, (+30+10), 50SR = 160 Total

Team D: 2D, 0P, 10NA, (-10+30), 90SR = 130 Total

Team E: 3D, 2P, 6NA, (-10+30), 120SR = 180 Total

Team F: 6D, 2P, 6NA, (-10+30), 100SR = 190 Total.

(D = Direct Qns Answered, P = Passed Qns Answered, NA = Not Answered, SR = Speed Round score, Parenthesis indicate Difficult/Easy round score)

I.Q. at Techstasy (VIT)

I.Q. was the quiz which was a part of Techstasy, an inter-college event organised by Comp & IT dept. of VIT.

Results:

1st: Kunal Sawardekar, Anirudh Shiva [FC]

2nd: Ganesh Hegde, Siddharth Dani [VIT]

Other finalists:

Nikhil Kundargi, Neil Mehta [ PICT ]

Anand Ayyadurai, Anupam Akolkar [VIT]

Anand, Pratik [SCIT]

Organized by: Harsh Ketkar, Kunal Thakar, Salil Bijur

Calling for groupies

Face it, if you are a regular reader of this blog and believe in the associated pastime, then you're not very likely to become a groupie of some rock group. Instead, why not become a group member for this blog and contribute to match reports, contemporary state of quizzing and other features?

Note: Not looking for frivolous commentary here (that's restricted only to me).

The Pinnacle Quiz (SIT)

Results 1st: Kunal Sawardekar [FC], Salil Bijur [VIT]
2nd: Nikhil Kundargi [ PICT ], Neil Mehta [ PICT ]
3rd: Hrishikesh Kavade [SIT] (???) [SIT]
Other finalists: Siddharth Dani [VIT] & Kunal Thakar [VIT], Rashmi Vadnagare[VIT] & Harsh Ketkar [VIT], & a SIT team

The Organizers: Akshay Pande & Akshay Raut

Notes: * The quality of the questions was quite respectable although they did tend to be a bit obscure at times . A lot of all-around passes ensured a pretty low scoring quiz.

* organized at SIT[Sinhagad College Of Engineering Pune]

* This is the second year running that a quiz has been organized at SIT. (I think) that last year it had been under the aegis of the computer department . This year's version was managed by the Electronics And Telecommunications department.

:: Report by Nikhil

Inquizzition winners

Winners at Fergusson College, Pune's annual quiz:

2000 : Gaurav Sabnis & Neeraj Sane (COEP)
2001 : Manish Mahajan & Arka Bhattacharya (COEP)
2002 : Samrat Sengupta & J. Ramanand (PSPL)
2003 : Samrat Sengupta & Sudarshan Purohit (PSPL)
2004 : Amit Garde & Hareeth Sridhar (PSPL)

I've started this to maintain these lists for future reference - will add to incorporate runners-up & finalists et al

Inquizzition - V

Date: 4 Sep 2004

Results

1st: Persistent Systems Pvt Ltd - Amit Garde & Hareeth Sridhar
2nd: Infosys Pune/Accenture - Dibyasree (?) + 1
3ed: BCQC - Gaurav Sabnis & J. Ramanand
Other finalists: Sinhagad COE, Meghashyam & Asavari Shirodkar, Amit Varma & Siddhartha V. (Wisden Cricinfo)

Set by: Quest - FC Quizzing Circle

Conducted by: Kunal Sawardekar

Notes:

* PSPL won for the third year running, but 5 different people have been involved in these wins!

* Interesting (to me atleast :-) ) observation: on all occasions (actually on 4 out of 5 occasions I have witnessed, not sure about 2001), either Team A or B (which sit on the left side to the audience on stage) has ended up victorious!

Quizeitgeist - I

Not sure how many have seen Google's Zeitgeist page, something that is rarely less than revelatory.

From the bottom of the very page:

zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 |
Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

Quizzes over a period of time establish their own zeitgeist. Most good annual quizzes achieve an invisible spirit and discernible patterns of their own which characterize them and their times. Quite often they are reflective of the people behind them, but many times they are indicative of trends and inclinations of their times. You'll also find a lot of grizzled quizzers shaking their heads at the "new age" of quizzing; this sport of ours is prone to the theory of the generation gap.

This post attempts to capture this slightly undefinable feeling and kicks off a small attempt to continually monitor the quizzing ethos of these times - flawed the results maybe, but they may turn up interesting insights as well. As ever, contributions welcome and maybe I need to have a better place for people to note them down.

A few observations from the past:

"Dis-top-pick-a": the topics of choice

* Tintin and Asterix: quintessential quizzing topics, with Asterix especially being very anecdote-trivia-friendly with the derivative names and the retro-history.

* Sherlock Holmes: classical quizzing is never without reference to the ultimate private detective. Even today, Sigerson or Tibet or the Reichenbach or the Napoleon of Crime are invoked in almost every quiz.

* Pink Floyd: something perhaps to do with quizzing youth discovering quizzing and rock music in college (sometimes just fashionably) simultaneously. Again, PF are a trivia friendly music group, with associations with DNA & Hawking serving them well.

* Douglas Adams: watch out for questions #42 or #21, try guessing Douglas Adams if you have no better guess. DNA is much beloved in the quizzing world, who pay homage whenever they can.

* Google: displaced Apple as the most trivia-friendly corporation on earth. They lay out the carpet for quiz-setters and we respond as if in honeyed seduction. Plus the fact that "Coolge" is *the* weapon of choice for the quiz-setter.

* Olympics & World Cup cricket: So much gets added every 4 years that we don't mind really.

* Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Andaaz Apna Apna, Sholay and more: Atleast you'll hear a lot about them at the BC.

* Richard P.Feynman, Oppenheimer and the rest: admittedly no more at their peak, but quite the rage in BC circles about 3-4 years ago.

* Harry Potter and LOTR: These strong contenders in the last few years have meant that ambitious quizzers need to stock up on them. Quizzers prone to snubbing their noses at these upstart topics, well, just don't make finals anymore :-)

* Formula One: All I know about F-1, I learnt from listening to questions. Sad (me of course).

Topics for later: QZG at Annual quizzes.

The Worst Quiz I Ever Won

A stone's throw away(a paper airplane's throw away?) from the Pune Railway Station, stands Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Medical College (BJMC) one of the most reputed med-schools in Western India. This august institution was the scene for the worst quiz I have ever won.

The notice for the quiz was put up on the COEP Boat Club one rainy day when i was in Third Year. It was the part of BJMC's annual fest(!!). The exact name of the fest presently eludes me, but it was one of Ganesha's names. I am always game for any quiz, so I enthusiastically called up the organisers and registered for it. The first omen was the non-availability of my regular quizzing partner, Neeraj. He had to go out of station. It however gave me the opportunity to team up with Saket, another classmate of mine.

Both of us reached BJMC. The scene of the quiz was a lecture hall that made COEP's M-13 look like the floor of a posh call centre. And anyone who has attended a lecture/PPT in M-13 will grasp the gravity of the comment. General din prevailed. the whole scene could have easily passed as the lower house of the Indian parliament. For some reason, the hall was littered with paper airplanes. Then we saw guys generally aiming those airplanes at girls!!

Anyhoo, getting to the quiz. First there were written elims. The elims sheet was cyclostyled!! Who cyclostyles anything nowadays? The questions were atrocious. A few samples

- Who was the first Indian to win the Oskar(sic) Prize(sic)?
- Which Indian woman recently achieved(sic) the Booker Prize?
- Name all four tennis grandslams

The highlight of the elims was the question - "Who was the first indian to win a bronze medal at Olympic Awards(sic)?"

While giving out the answer to this particular question, the quizmaster raised one hand up and shouted "IT WAS KHASHABA JADHAV FROM KOLHAAAAAAAAPUUUUUUUUUUR!!". A section of the crowd, no doubt from Kolhapur, starting banging the benches in glee, and for about 5 minutes there were several cheers in Marathi for a five-decade-old medal.

Anyway, I'm ashamed to say we topped the elims. Other teams on the stage included a team from BJMC (not their regular team), and two from our beloved AFMC.

The questions in the finals made the elims look great. They were as sidey as can get. Throughout the quiz, paper airplanes continued to be showered. A friend later told me, this is a tradition in BJMC.

Saket and I won quite easily in the end. One of the victories that you dont mention on your CV.