Interrobang

Qing 2005 - The Solo Quiz Update Correction: Quiz was set and conducted by Gaurav and Sarika Results Won by Major Brijesh. Other finalists: Sanket, Salil, Shamanth, Satyen, Sudarshan, Kunal and Ramanand (the last two and Brijesh breaking the hegemony of the S-quizzers). Date - 31st December Proposed Time - 10 a.m. To be conducted by Gaurav Venue - COEP Boat Club There will be written elims, so don't forget to get pens/pencils. If there are any changes in timing, I will try to update this blog as soon as possible. If possible, please call any of the BC quizzers known to you for confirmation, or check the inquizitive egroup for updates.

A history of the BC quiz club - V Sancho joins in our series of articles on BC quizzing through the years with some reminiscences from '93 to '98. The previous articles on the topic are at: 1 , 2 , 3 (All by Shrirang), 4 (Vishal Dalal) I joined COEP in October 93. Ours was the year there was a series of court cases which meant that college started very late. Admissions happened on 27th sep and we started off on october 4th. For my first three sems there seemed to be no quizzing going on for practical purposes. I know today that COEP was active in quizzing circles at that time with people like Srirang, Maya, Karve, Vishal, etc but i as a new comer simply did not know that they existed. I had quizzed a bit in school but had stopped totally in the 11th and 12th. i got to know first of quizzing when Akshaya, my batchmate, mentioned in passing that he had gone to AFMC for a quiz (he probably heard from Maya, his elder sister). At that time quizzing was, i guess, a very small...

Hayekian Quizzing Quizzers familiar with my "imaginative" connects can breathe easy. I am not about to ask a connect related to Salma Hayek. Instead I want to speak a bit about the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek and the concept of Spontaneous Order. I, like all strong believers in the virtue of the free market system, swear by the concept of spontaneous order. Spontaneous order means emergence of an order out of what are seemingly chaotic or disorderly circumstances, and oput of a natural process. It is believed that things that benefit society the most are the product of spontaneous forces that are beyond the direct control of a single man. It is this principle that is used to argue in favour of a laisse-faire capitalist system sans any top-down "regulation" as against a state-led/state-controlled/state-regulated economy. Though Hayek's ideas are used mainly in the field of economics (he got the Economics Nobel in 1974), they can apply to any situation or s...

(a.k.a Pune's Oldest Quiz) Date : 12th Nov. Venue : Dewang Mehta Aud, PSPL. Conducted by: Major Brijesh Nair Results : 1. Major Shankar, Sudarshan Purohit (SuperSub : Niranjan Pedanekar) 2. Vasukeshav Sharma and Chandrakant Nair 3. Ganesh Hegde and Ashish Chauhan 4. Anand Shivashankar and Meghashyam Shirodkar 5. Aditya Udas and Anupam Akolkar 6. Safal Mohammad & Vivek Philip 7. Siddharth Dani and Abhishek Nagaraj (a.k.a Dhoni ko kaun Taal sakta hai ? ) Smart Ass Comments: Niranjan added another feather to an already burgeoning cap by becoming the first ever substitute in (pune?)quizzing. Thus becoming the superest sub since the super one , replacing Major Shankar midway through the quiz. Please contact the partners-in-crime for exact details of the time, nakshatra and positions of planets when this happened, for future reference. This quiz saw the forging of a new 'harlem globetrotters' in quizzing. Herald the age of the ANNAarchists. And yes - Brij...

Niranjan's thoughts on Nupur's post Context: Read this This [the post] is an excellent summarization of what went on at the BCQC from the perspective of the 'oppressed' ;)) Bravo! I do think that these things matter to some extent. But yet, I do not fully agree with the main theme of Nupur's post, and would like to convey my personal point of view in this matter. I know that Nupur has been seriously interested in quizzing and a fairly regular quizzer. Therefore, whatever I want to say may not apply to her in specific, but to the issues she has mentioned in general. I remember the first few encounters of Shrirang, George, Ramanand, et al (and even me ;)) at the BCQC. These could not easily be termed as friendly. I clearly remember Ramanand being scoffed at in his first quiz, I don't know whether 'even' he remembers it ;)) George has mostly been an adamant rogue, but an object of ridicule at times ;)) But yet, these guys continued. I think that was...

Date: 5th November 2005. Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium. Organised by: Abhishek Nagraj, Kapeesh Saraf, Aniket Khasgiwale (I hope I spelled that right) & Gaurav Singh. Main Quiz Results: 1st: Shamanth Rao + Kunal Sawardekar. 2nd: Anand Shivshankar + Meghashyam Shirodkar. 3rd: Maj. Brijesh Nair + Manish Manke. Also: Gaurav Sabnis + D. Dharmendra; Niranjan Pedanekar + Sudarshan Purohit; Shivaji Marella + Ganesh Hegde Picture Quiz Results: 1st: Niranjan Pedanekar. 2nd: Ganesh Hegde.

The BCQC: Its downfall and rise The following is by a now expat member of the group, Nupur, who was at COEP a few years ago. This also reminds me that the story of the BC quizzing scene was last told until the mid 90s. We need someone to push it till '97 as there are many of us who can take the story ahead from there :-). This post is a little provocative for members of that era, so comments are more than invited. I think the Boat Club Quiz Club was strategically flawed. These are my views on what I had experienced 2 years ago at the BCQC and I think I kind of understand why there was a major dip in the QC population (and popularity?), in the year 2002. These are my views on what I think was going wrong. I do not know how true it is now. Explaining the answers : I think this was the #1 reason why many people lost enthusiasm to attend the QC. Lets take an example. (I recall this one clearly) The question was: " What comes in 6 'flavours'. Top, Bottom, Up, Down,...

Shyam Bhatt Memorial Quiz 2005 Shyam Bhatt Memorial Quiz 2005, the annual quiz organized by the students of Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC), Pune will be held this weekend. Date : 12th October, 2005, Saturday Time : 5pm Venue : Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Bhageerath building, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd. Behind Domino's Pizza, Senapati Bapat Road Participation: Open quiz. Teams of max two members. Entry Fee: Rs 40/- per team. Cash prizes to be won. Contact: Major Brijesh Nair - 93120-62615

Triads Sanjeev "Sancho" Chandran, one of the old stalwarts of the BC during his engineering days at COEP from 1993-97 wrote in w.r.t the posts on Connections to mention something known as triads . Here's what he had to say on it: I seem to remember we used to run a version of connexions called triads which did not find mention in your post. i don't know if it still exists - it was never very widely done because it was a little complicated (especially to explain in a mail, as you will see below) but good fun when done in practice. The basic funda is as follows. there are three distinct clues for something say 10122, 79, 34 or pc barua, saigal, dilip kumar (these might not be very good q's - i am quite rusty). let's say the q is to be asked to team A. Normally the teams are first told what the answer is expected to be (a person, an event, a place, a book etc). this is however optional and the QM may choose to give this or not depending on his fee...

Watch this space for more details about the November round. Until then check out the teaser here . Update 1 : The date is 5th Nov. I will confirm the timings soon. Please check out the full details, sample questions and contact info here . You can contact me at : cheerfulguy(AT)gmail(DOT)com Update Deux : The final details are as follows : 1. Scope : General / Trivia 2. Date : 5th November, 2005 3. Day : Saturday 4. Place : Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd., Senapati Bapat Rd. Pune. 5. Time : 4 : 30 PM 6. Teams of 2 / open for all Contact no : +91-20-25468688 Cheers,

I've started a Wikipedia article on Indian Quizzing here . As of now, it is woefully incomplete, and a lot of the stuff I've written is crap. But the important thing is that there IS a page on it, and I've tried to give it some semblance of a structure. I'd like to request quizzers who feel they have information that needs to go into the article to please contribute in filling it out. Right now, work is needed on almost evry section, including the Quizzing by City section, Types of Quizzes section and Quizzing by Topic section.

link - Pune Leg - Saturday, 15th Oct. @ Nehru Memorial Hall. - organized by CRY - Corporate General Quiz - QM : Gautam Bhimani Results: 1. MBT - Ankit, Pawan 2. Honeywell - Nilesh, Anand 3. Tata Motors - Saurav + 1 4. Tata Tech - Krishna, Vasant 5. Infosys - Harish + Manish 6. Aviva - Exl : Sudeep, Sanjay Comments : (+) Special Word for Gautam Bhimani, a really nice QM (+) Extremely nice A/V questions. Not often do you get that. (+) A Majority of the questions were very good, and lots of new areas not talked about here. (+) Nice organization, flexible rules and coordial hosts made it a pleasure to be there. (-) The scoring system was the major grudge, the first and last rounds has a lot of points, and the 10+5 system didn't help. (-) The fewer number of teams for such a big quiz surprised me, but this might be because it was the 1st year in Pune. Notes : * Shamanth + 1(kanbay), Tata Tech and one more team(IIRC Tata Systems) had a long tie-breaker for the...

The September/October 2005 Open Quiz - Results Sudarshan conducted our latest Open Quiz - an Entertainment Quiz - last Saturday. I've seldom seen such good theme quizzes, and especially since this was Sud's debut effort at conducting a quiz, it was quite a good effort. I got a peek into many new themes I never knew much about. Results 1st: Kunal Sawardekar and Niranjan Pedanekar 2nd: Amit Varma and Leslie Mathew 3rd: Gaurav Sabnis and Anand Sivashankar Other Finalists: Amit Garde & Brajesh, Shamanth Rao and J. Ramanand, Meghashyam Shirodkar and Aditya Udas Despite the slight snafu of the sponsors not turning up, we do have prizes for the finalists (we think :-) ). Finalists: Kindly send an email with your postal address to Sudarshan (email address: sudarshan (dought) purohit (at) gmail (dought) com) or leave them behind on the comments for this post. Sud will make all necessary arrangements. Any reviews? Use the comments please.

Quizzing Vocab Harish unearthed this very interesting link to do about quizzing vocabulary. Bet you didn't know much about the Cricket Pitch Question, Multivia and Buzzer Rock.

Engima 2K5 Concepts held at Bharti Vidyapeeth Deemed University College of Engineering (BVDUCOE) Date: 1st Oct 2005 Results 1st: Salil Bijur & Arnab Pal (VIT) 2nd: Ashim Tiwari & Suvajit Chakraborty (Symbiosis) 3rd: Anupam Akolkar & Siddharth Joshi (VIT) 4th: Abhishek Nagaraj & Aniket Khasgiwale (COEP) 5th: Shyamal Kishore & Amit Kumar (BVDUCOE) 6th: Sumant Singh & Abhigya Reshu (BVDUCOE) Set by: Debashish Roy Report: Enigma 2K5 was general quiz with a heavy tilt towards biz questions. D&P and a faulty seating arrangement (descending order of elims scored from A-F) ensured an imbalance in the no. of attempts per team. However the questions in the later rounds helped us make a comeback. Rounds: After a general round (with many biz questions), there was an exclusive business round, a rapid fire round (with many biz questions) and a mixed bag round (with many biz questions). The questions in the take-your-pick round were too less (on...

Vedaant 2005 Date: 28th Sep 2005 Results: 1st: Safal Mohammad & Vivek Philip (AFMC) 2nd: Salil Bijur & Arnab Pal (VIT) 3rd: Shreekant Awchar & R. Shyam Krishnan (BJMC) 4th: Philip Mathew & Neelabh Nayan (AFMC) Set By: L.A. Committee of Vedaant 2005 Report: First a few flashbacks to BJMC quizzes by Gaurav and by Kunal S . As compared to last time, the questions this time were worse. Alongwith school quiz and Manorama type trivia, there were also some like "In which city did the Boston Tea Party take place?" or "In which city is the Leaning Tower of Pisa?". The elims were multiple choice with negative marking. After 2 semifinals, there were 5 rounds in the finals like 2 rounds of D&P, Fastest Finger First, an "interesting" Who Am I?, Crossword and Rapid Fire. After experiences from last year, this time there were professional security guards for controlling the audience. A few paper planes did make it to the stage though. O...

The September Open Quiz '05 {'twas the September Quiz, but happening in October} Announcing a speciality quiz on Arts and Entertainment Date : 8th October, 2005, Saturday Time : The Elims start at 5 pm. Finals expected to start by 6, and end by 9 pm. There is no registration required. Please arrive by 4:45 pm Venue : Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Bhageerath building, Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd. Behind Domino's Pizza, Senapati Bapat Road Teams : Two member teams. Anyone and everyone is allowed (except George Thomas, who will be the non-present chief guest) Prizes : sponsored by Foliage Outdoors. Merchandise, CDs, and whatever other cool stuff they come up with. Theme : Arts, movies, music, books, comics, pop culture, and anything else related to these. Contact : Sudarshan [sudarshan (dought) purohit (at) gmail (dought) com]. Or call (020) 27290002 before 10 am or after 8 pm.

Sunday's Open Sports quiz From Harish's comment - looks like it's not only that sports is a young person's game, but that sports quizzes too. Was it too ESPN Sports Quizzer friendly? Shamanth and his partner won this one. They were the oldest team on stage with finalists/winners of the ESPN Star school quiz making the rest of the fray. Abhishek and Aniket from COEP were leading initially but the lack of IR and the buzzer set-up did them in.Shamanth's team did well to win this one. Great to see lot of young blood on stage - a team from Abhinav had two boys in their Class X putting up a good show.

Inquizzition - VI Date : 24 Sep 2005 Results 1st: Amit Garde & Trilok Khairnar 2nd: Shivaji Marella and Ganesh Hegde 3rd: Gaurav Sabnis and Sarika Chuni Other finalists: B.V.Harishkumar and J.Ramanand, Amit Varma and Leslie Mathew, Niranjan Pedanekar and Sudarshan Purohit Set by : Quest - FC Quizzing Circle Conducted by : Kunal Sawardekar Reviews : (Please leave them in the comments - I'll try and add them here)

Bheja Fry at Techstasy 2005 Bheja Fry, the quiz at Techstasy, the annual event organised by Comp-IT dept. of VIT was held on 22nd Sep. Organised by: Harsh Ketkar, Anay Kulkarni, Chinmay Borkar Results: 1st: Kunal Sawardekar & Ulka Athalye (FC) 2nd: Siddharth Dani & Arnold D'Souza (VIT) 3rd: Akshay Jog & Maitreyi Gupta (VIT) 4th: Abhishek Nagaraj & Kapeesh Saraf (COEP) 5th: Anupam Akolkar & Anand Ayyadurai (VIT) 6th: Udbhav Bhatnagar & Kartik Shah (COEP)

Quizzy Logic '05 part of AISSMS' annual fest Silicon Fusion Date : Wed, 21st Sep. 05 Results : 1. Siddharth Dani and Abhishek Nagaraj (VIT, COEP) 2. Anupam Akolkar and Rahul Bhat (VIT) 3. Aniket Khasgiwale and Vineet Bhatawadekar(COEP) 4. +1 AISSMS Team Notes: Ill managed esp. in terms of time. 3 hrs between elims and finals The questions could be said to be 'tough' bordering on 'obsure'. Negative marking/ Half IR Half D&P didn't help. However atleast the questions were original and this quiz was definitely a step in the right direction. PS : There was the old 'chestnut' about the Warner Bros. only this time it was printed as : Jack + William + Robert + John = ? later modified to, Jack + Harry + Albert + Sam = ?

Open Sports quiz - Rotary Club An Open Sports quiz is being organized by Rotary Club. Date :Sunday, 25th September. Time : 1430 Teams of two Venue: Gandhi Bhavan Hall, Near Girls Blind School, Behind Cummins India, Kothrud Pune

Inquizzition 2005: An Open Quiz organised by Fergusson College, Pune. Features : Open Trivia Quiz (Not restricted to college teams). Two member teams. Cross-college and cross-institutional teams allowed. Venue: Fergusson College Amphitheater. Date: Saturday, 24th September 2005. Time: Registrations from 11:30 am. Elims begin 12:30 pm, Finals begin 2:30 pm. Prizes worth over Rs. 15000. Audience Prizes and prizes for all finalists. Contact: Kunal [#9850160475, kunalns(at)gmail(dot)com], Puranjay [#9370191718, puranjay(underscore)p(at)rediffmail(dot)com].

Upcoming College Quizzes Bheja Fry, Techstasy 2005 22nd Sep Venue: Vishwakarma Inst. of Technology, Pune Time: Elims at 9.30 am Contact: Harsh 9881379417 http://www.vit.edu/techstasy for more details. Inquizitive, Vedaant 2005 23rd Sep Venue: B.J. Medical College Time: 11.30 am http://geocities.com/bjmcvedant2005/ for more details.

Part of Abhivyakti, MIT. Organized by : Akshad Vishwanathan, Kedar Toraskar. Results: 1st : Kunal Sawardekar & Ulka Athale (FC) 2nd : Salil Bijur(VIT) & Janice D'Sa (PICT) 3rd : Abhishek Nagaraj & Aniket Khasgiwale (COEP) 4th : Kunal Thakar & Arnold D'Souza (VIT) 5th : Vasukeshav Sharma & Chandrakant Nair(AFMC) 6th : Rahul Phadnis & Viraj Phanse (MIT) Report : The 'English' Quiz at MIT was doing its first round at 'Abhivyakti' - basically a public speaking event. The management was excellent and on the whole everything seemed to be well run. There were no technical snags (with a VB based presentation) and 'live' scores. There was a slight glitch in the elims scoring with Dani & Anupam having to give up their place for Salil's team. Apart from that most things seemed OK. Coming to the questions, they were the usual mix of recycled, chestnuts and some really nice ones. Overall the effort was excellent and the...

Telecom GrandMasters Quiz Harsh Ketkar and Arnab Pal of VIT won the Telecom GrandMasters Quiz organised by Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management on 5th Aug 2005. Here's what Harsh has to say: Telecom GrandMasters Quiz was a national level Business quiz, with over 600 participants taking part, corporates and students alike, in the written eliminations round. Five teams were selected; two corporate teams and three student teams. The corporate teams were from Computer Associates, Bangalore; and from Avaya Software, Pune. The other student teams were ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad; and Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies, Pune. Our team from VIT was the only undergraduate and engineering college team. The questions were mostly easy. Some were repeated, but the easy nature was compensated for by the buzzer and rapid-fire rounds. I'd give it a 6/10 on the toughness level. Plus there was a crossword round, and a gambling round, where you had to play for 10 or 20 point...

Organised by: SCOE Electronics Department. Results 1st: Puranjay Parchure and Kunal Sawardekar (Fergusson) 2nd: Siddharth Dani and Kunal Thakar (VIT) 3rd: Anupam Akolkar and Abhishek Nagraj (VIT & COEP/PIET) Also: Kapeesh Saraf and Vineet Bhatawadekar (COEP/PIET), Unknown Team (VIT) Remarks: - The quiz was quite decent, more so because it was a fiirst effort for all those involved. However, any goodwill the new SCOE junta might have earned today wassquandered by all the delays and technical snags. - The finals questions were ok, but the scoring system made it unnecessarily arbit. They had a weird funda that the first two rounds had forty mark questions, the next two sixty mark questions, the next two eighty markers, and the last four had one hundred mark questions. However, the difficulty level never really varied, and we got some real sitters direct in the seventh and eighth rounds, which was chiefly responsible for our victory. Oh, and they had D&P, so you had X pe...

Resonance 2005, MESCOE Sports & Entertainment Quiz 11th Aug 2005 Results: 1st: Siddharth Dani & Salil Bijur (VIT) 2nd: Arvind Iyengar & Nitin Satyamurthi (MESCOE) 3rd: Anupam Akolkar & Anand Ayyadurai (VIT) 4th: Abhishek Nagaraj & Kapeesh Saraf (COEP) Joint 5th: Anirudh Kasbekar & Arnab Pal (VIT), Rahul Phadnis & Mihir Kulkarni (MIT) Quiz setters: Karan Oberoi Report: Resonance '05 was the IEEE organised event in MESCOE where the quiz was one of the sub-events. The quiz was a purely 'Sports & Entertainment'. The elims were rather long, with 50 questions, mostly from western entertainment. The elims questions were decent: many original, some were recycled, some lifted straight away, some really obscure. The finals began with 2 separate infinite rebounds rounds of entertainment and sports each. Anand & Anupam took a lead in the Ent round when Arvind and Nitin caught up in the Sports round. Siddharth and I scored in t...

( Mirrored on my personal blog . Parnab Mukherjee (you can see a picture here ). That one name is guaranteed to make any serious quizzers blood boil. In his many years of conducting quizzes, he has chalked up a reputation for many things. He's been accused of embellishing his resume , lying about his education , unfairly influencing the outcome of quizzes and having a 6-year old alter ego . In fact, as the saying in quizzing circles goes, the "b" in his name (pronounced "Por-nob" in Bengali) should be left out, because his quizzes are so obscene. But all that is hearsay. I am now in a position to give you the dope on Parnab da first hand because today, I have had the infinite pleasure of actually attending a genuine 24-karat Parnab quiz. When Salil told me that Parnab was conducting the SCIT Business Quiz, I knew I just had to go. Yes, the quiz was in a remote corner of Pune, and that the organisers were charging an obscene 100 bucks per participant*, ...

Season Opener 2005-06 aka the July Open Quiz Results 1st: Niranjan Pedanekar & J. Ramanand 2nd: Gaurav Sabnis & Sudarshan Purohit 3rd: Manish Manke & Nishad Manerikar 4th: Amit Varma & Leslie 5th: Salil Bijur and Anupam Akolkar 6th: Siddharth Natarajan & Siddharth Dani 7th: names not recalled Not sure if I've got the 5th and 6th places right, and can't recall the names of the team in 7th place - Please let me know if anyone remembers Organised & Conducted by : B.V. Harish Kumar Report: Before beginning the report, we must record that Harish had just about 3 weeks to put this quiz together, so it was quite a commendable effort in the circumstances. A 25 question elims (a little too short) was quite tight, with most teams answering the same questions and not being able to differentiate themselves too much. The result was a 4-way tie for the last 3 spots, which could be split using the inbuild elim tie-breaker but still left us with 2 teams for...

The July Open Quiz Details * Open quiz. * Flavour : General * Teams of 2 * No Registration fee * Date : 9th July (Saturday) * Time : 1630 hrs * Venue : Bhageerath,PSPL - behind Domino's Pizza on Senapati Bapat Road * Conducted by: Harish Please assemble at the venue by 1630 hrs so that we can start the elims at 1700 hrs. :: Harish

Venue : Sophiya College,Mumbai Date : 12th June, Sunday. Time : 10 to 11:30 am Organizers : Karnataka Quizzing Association (KQA) Maha!Quizzer was a unique format consisting of 150 written questions to be answered in 1.5 hours at the same time at 5 locations around the country(Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Trivandrum and Mumbai). There were prizes for local winners and the title of Mahaquizzer was to be bestowed upon the person with the highest score in all 5 cities. The only problem was that when a quiz is conducted across geographical boundaries care needs to be taken about the scope being truly fair to people from all the places involved. There were many questions which were very south-centric - for eg. we were asked about a certain mountain range you pass while going from trivandrum to bangalore or something like that. Another complaint was the sport. All the questions involved niche sports and their rules. There were no cricket-nostalgia questions or sport questions that d...

Anand & Vibhendu's Elims classifications Anand and Vibhendu did some preliminary classification of *Elimination* rounds from four quizzes: Chakravyuuh 2005 , JBIMS, PiQue 2005 and Quiz-O-Mania 2005 . After some application of MS Excel pivot chart magic (thus recouping their MBA investments), they have the following graphs to show. The base data is available with me in case anyone's interested. Each image has been preceded by a small note from A & V on how they arrived at those classifications. Category [Anand]: Simple [classes], we used a school subject kinda classification consciously trying to nail everything: less on Misc. etc, Social Sc includes History, Geo, Politics, Eco etc and hence appears to have more weightage. (No entry for Yoga, SUPW ( Ramanand's note: SUPW stands for "Socially Useful Productive Work" (and has other variations too) )) [Vibhendu]: Mythology, etymology are clubbed under Lit for most cases. Category Provenance ...

On Fairness - Hirak's Blade After the recent series of posts on the maddening methods, one of our old prabhaaris (the man who almost had the Inquizzition quiz named after him and the orator of the lost Mood-I monologue) Hirak has this to say: (Hirak, pardon me for the usual digs and for including the note before your actual "post" - I included it because I found it relevant) I was reading the latest series of posts and I think that this discussion is in serious need of Occam's razor. I posted a rather long comment and I have removed it and I request you to post it on my behalf. You had started a thread about what question setting is all about and that discussion has got subverted on the way. It seems to me that this discussion on systems is quite futile and even if someone does simulate them, the core assumption is that ALL questions will be fair and equal. Such an assumption can never be made so every simulation suffers from a serious flaw. I, like you, ...

Quizzes are unfair competitions. In a running race, for example, all the athletes run on the same track, and the fastest among them wins. In golf, all the competitors play on the same course under the same conditions, and the most skilled of them wins. In a quiz, however, each team of finalists is asked a different question each time that other teams may or may not get to answer. Hence, many factors such as the seating of teams, the passing format, bias in question setting, etc skew the outcome in a way that may not reflect the ability of the teams. Okay, so all of that is old news. Today, stuff like Infinite Rebounds as a passing format and drawing lots for seating are pretty standard in quizzes. However, this is not enough. More is needed. Althought the combination of IR and drawing lots has made quizzes more fair than before, it is felt that we should go further to ensure fairness. So the questions is, what more can be done? The Centaurian System The Centaurian System is a pa...

Round Reversals - Are they really that effective? I was reading JR 's anniversary article archives written in a seemingly alternately illegible hand and experienced firsthand Gaurav 's pole-position & 4 quarter system at the S.E.Q. This post is a result of these two things. The point is this, whatever may be the fallacies in a particular system of scoring these are ironed out due to round reversal. I.e. if a certain team is getting large number of directs due to another team sitting before them, this advantage is immediately transferred to the team on the otherside of that team. So seemingly all is well. Then comes Quiz-O-mania '05, which witnessed super Vibhendu-Anand first half performance followed by an amazing catch-up in the second half by The Moops. (ala CSKA Moscow ). Reason? It was surmised that the first half of questions had a concentration of Hindi-film questions and due to these questions being absent and/or due to round reversal Gaurav's team getting...

The Pune Season Ender Quiz 2004-05 14th May 2005 Results: 1st: Niranjan Pednekar (TRDDC) & Sudarshan Purohit (PSPL) 2nd: Amit Varma and Leslie (Wisden Cricifo) 3rd: Rachit Lahoti (GSSL) and Abhinav Sharma (IIM Lucknow) Joint 4th : Aditya Udas (MESCOE) & Meghashyam Shirodkar, Ganesh Hegde (VIT) & Shivaji Marella (BJMC) 6th: Vivek Venkataramani (BJMC) and Abhishek Nagaraj (COEP) Organised by: Gaurav Sabnis, J. Ramanand & B.V. Harish Kumar QM: Gaurav Sabnis Report: The Season Ender Quiz (thats the official name) had all what everyone desires in a perfect quiz. The elims had fine audio questions spanning a variety of music genre. The finals were formatted as a basketball game with 4 quarters with a round reversal after each (with no change in positions). The scoring was 2 points for a correct answer and 1 for half, doing away with the usual multiple of 10s scoring pattern. This made the final scores rather close: 20 for the 1st upto 9 for the 6th. A new 'p...

Defending quizzing Samrat's quizzing partner at IIM-L, Tadatmya Vaishnav , has written a couple of posts on the usual arguments against quizzers & quizzing. Here they are: * In defence of quizzing - I * In defence of quizzing - II

Pune Quizzing League - Do we have a framework? [Post by Abhishek ] This is a reworked article about the long simmering idea for a Quizzing League system. I thought I would get the discussion started by putting up a preliminary framework. Points System This is the most important part. Points to be considered are: 1. Are points to be given for Elims performances? (even to non-finalists) 2. If yes, then how will they compare to finals points? 3. Generally accepted idea that points scored in finals directly added to total. (?) 4. Are bonus points to be given for 1st 2nd 3rd in Finals/Elims? 5. Resolution of ties? Following are my suggestions: 1. Elims marks will be considered for all those who have half the cut-off marks. Points = Elims score/Topper x 50. i.e. elims toppers get 50 points. 2. Points in Finals directly added via a percentile system. i.e. winning team gets 100. Rest get score/topper X 100. 3. Since the points are via a percentile system I don't think a...

PiQue 2005 I guess most of the day's participants are busy preparing for their exams, so it falls on me to record the results and leave the floor open for reviews. Results 1st: Kunal Sawardekar & Ganesh Hegde 2nd: Anand Sivashankar & Vibhendu Tiwari 3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar + 1 Also: Salil Bijur & Siddharth Dani, Gaurav Sabnis & Sarika Chuni and Sudarshan Purohit & Srihari Suthamally Organised by J. Ramanand & other Persistent quizzers Reports Got some feedback from Niranjan, Gaurav, Sud, Sarika & Harish. If you have any comments, please use the commenting boxes. From my part, the disappointing feature was the abbreviated nature of the finals, with barely more questions than in the elims. Also, a few repeats in the elims. Only 4 out of the 44 qns were unanswered with all teams putting on a good show and providing great answers.