Private rumblings from the Pune Brand Equity 2010 quiz

Niranjan and I teamed up for the Pune round of Brand Equity 2010 quiz where we finished 3rd. Neither of us is any good at biz-quizzing, and so admittedly, a mercenary attitude fueled the decision to travel the entire diameter of Pune. Despite the middle-level placing (not bad, given the presence and three-blade-close-shave elimination of some very good teams), we can't help a couple of rants.

On the difference between data mining and data compression

Or, to compress the question, the various differences between data compression. I hate having to answering such school-type questions¹, but I guess we're always ready to pawn our soul for 10 points :-). So we defined it as being techniques "for reducing the size of data for transmission/storage etc" (paraphrasing), but were ruled wrong. I'm not sure what the correct answer was, but I think it was to the effect of "extracting only that info from data that is needed" (memory fails me, as I was still reeling from the surprise). Without going deeply into data compression, there are different kinds: lossy (like in MP3s where you say that some data/info is unimportant enough to be thrown away) or lossless (such as in file compression, where you have a different, smaller form of your data to cheaply store or transmit). I'm not sure what was needed here.

The quizmaster did assert that he knew what he was looking for, he knew it would be one of this tricky ones, and he had sources who helped him "nail this one". He also did apologise a couple of times later, saying that he knew it was one of those borderline ones (i.e. for the inherent ambiguity, not that he was wrong about it), which was kind of him, I suppose. However:

• It's a terrible kind of question to ask - school homework-ish at best. Neither was it entertaining.
• If a quiz-setter knows a question/answer is inherently vague or prone to misinterpretation, then he'd be better off not asking it
• If it's not a domain you are familiar with, then you are dependent on hearing keywords in such answers - not a good idea
• Don't ask for 'layman' interpretations of technical questions - my layman lives in Shivajinagar, yours may live in Salt Lake.

On yet another case study of the demerits of Direct-and-Pass

I don't have much of a problem with big quizzes being designed to appeal to non-quizzing audiences, but why must they mess with the fairness of the rounds? The use of D&P over Infinite Rebounds (Infinite Bounce to non-Pune quizzers) is a menace that everyone in the game knows about. Most (and all good) quizzes use the IR system for their regular rounds because it guarantees one thing : between two shots at questions for any team, all other teams will have had a chance to attempt a question. IR does not smooth the fairness of the content or the fortune of receiving an easy question. But unlike D&P, you can be assured that your team will not twiddle its thumbs while the rest get to answer. Think of it as all teams receiving (almost) the same number of deliveries to bat to, at any given interval in time.

Yet another illustration of this from the other day: after 2 rounds of passing (one forward, one reverse), the number of attempts (out of 12 questions): two: A, B, F; three: E; five: C, D. Five vs. Two - that kind of imbalance would never happen in IR.

(This is no reflection on the qualities of the other teams, esp. the winners - just a commentary on why a quiz format shouldn't be so uneven. Let luck of the draw play its role in the content and team placement, but not the number of attempts.)

So why do big quizzes still employ an outdated and inferior system? Makes no sense at all.

---

1. read up for the future: the difference between ink pens and fountain pens; between MP3s and MP4s; between first slip and third slip (about a feet?)

Pounce and Bounce

A guest post by old BC alumnus Hirak Parikh, who now quizzes in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The original appeared on his blog here.

A veteran quizzer once told me that quizzing was not so much about knowing stuff, but was more about entertainment and having fun. I disagreed at that point thinking that such a remark was an act of high treason. Over the years, I have realised that quizzing is not a knowledge test. If it were so then quizzes would be like exams - timed and written. A written and timed test is the fairest way to judge who knows the most. All teams get the same questions, no question of order or luck. The team/person that got the highest number of correct answers would walk home with the prize. That's not the point, is it? The point is to have fun.

Over the years, people have obsessed over the best format that minimizes luck and ensures that the team that knows the most (read: best) wins. Quizzing innovations is an activity which has almost become a kind of cottage industry among quizzers with time on their hands. I am about to add more to that body of literature. That being said IMHO, my experience suggests that there is no point looking for the Holy Grail of a perfect format. A good quiz depends on ensuring three simple things in order of importance:

a) The format should be the 'modified infinite bounds with a midway reversal'. All questions have equal points, the next question to the team to the left/right of the team that answered it. If the question is unanswered then the original teams gets the next question. Order reverses halfway during the quiz.

b) A long quiz.
I think for 5-6 teams there should be at least >40 questions. A factor of 10 is ideal. Even the old system of rounds with pass-direct questions (full points for direct, and half for a pass question) would be okay provided the quiz was long enough. c) Questions, questions, questions.
The greatest evil is not the format, or the order, or marking scheme -- but bad questions. If questions are set correctly, spread over different topics evenly, and are of similar difficulty then the quiz will be fair and the best team 'should' win.

In practice, luck and order does play somewhat of a role even in the modified infinite bounds format, though b) should take care of it to some extent. The critical issue is to normalize questions in some fashion. Why normalize? Each quizmaster (QM) has his/her own personal strength (read: fetish) and quizzes as a result tend towards personal idiosyncrasies. The good QM is diligent about this and goes about setting questions keeping in mind those biases (knowing the QM and his/her strengths can help you work out the answer, cause you can guess what he/she knows, and how he/she sets questions). One way to do it, as is usually done for big quizzes, is to have two or more question-setters with divergent interests.

Despite the best intentions of the QM(s): all questions are not equal, some are more equal than others. A QM may think that a question is reasonably difficult, but may turn out to be a sitter. On the other hand, some questions are way too tough and end up being unanswered. Personally, if more than 10-15% of questions end up this way then the QM did a bad job. You cannot go about an weigh each question for difficulty.

The other aspect is that there should be some drama, some element of excitement in a quiz. I am a fan of 'buzzer-rounds' which have fallen out of favour in recent times. It provided that adrenalin-rush and rewarded quick recall and reflexes which are sadly missing from the current slow-cooking style. The current trend is away from the fireworks and some quizzes have written components at the start. This is bad, bad, bad.

Long story short. I tried out two innovations at the quizclub. Each team was given two wildcards to allow them to Pounce or Bounce a question.

Pounce: You can attempt a question out of turn. The team has to write down the question or tell the quizmaster before the question is attempted by any of the other teams in regular fashion. There are no negatives and a correct answer get full points.

Bounce: You can bounce a question to the team of your choice. If team doesn't answer it correctly they get -(full points), and if they do answer it correctly they get the full points. Regardless of the outcome, the team bouncing gets the next question.

The rationale behind the Pounce rule was to ensure that sitters can attempted by all. In the past, with great difficulty I have resisted urges to destroy the chair I was sitting on, or strangling the person who smirks when handed a sitter as a direct while I was left wringing my hands in despair. Often, close quizzes are decided on the basis of which team got slightly easier questions. This is where the Pounce comes in. Jump in on question out-of-queue. Grab a sitter. Of course, a team can misjudge the opponents knowledge and would end up with the question in the regular course of events.

The rationale behind the Bounce rule is to induce some excitement and additionally serves as a handicap for the obviously better team(s). There are always going to be a few questions that seem so unreasonable and tough that no one can answer them and a weaker team can either direct it towards the strongest team, or to their closest rival to level the playing field. Of course, if a team is really good and they can actually answer the question that seemed 'too tough' then all the better for them.

Innovations in practice:
This weekend when I tried these out and found the results mixed. No one team used the Bounce rule. They all played too nice, perhaps fearing retribution. The Pounce rule was used by all teams to good effect. Only once out of six times did a team not answer the question correctly. In all six cases, the team would not have got the question in the regular order and judged the moment of 'pouncing' correctly.

This was the casual Saturday quiz and not the best testing ground when there were only three teams and no one was too worried about winning or losing as there was nothing at stake. I curious to see how this works out in a longer, larger quiz more at stake. These rules do favour teams that can fake emotions of knowing or not knowing answers depending on the situation. A tight quiz can almost be like a poker game.
You can sometimes work out the answer being seeing who knows it.

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 2

First apologies to all those who have been asking for a copy of the questions. I'm having some serious trouble with my PC right now that renders me hapless when dealing with MS Office. It'll be out soon.

In Part 1, I explained how I went about collecting the content for my quiz. Hopefully, those who were there were pleasantly surprised by the chosen format. Here's how I went about it:

Format
Most quizzes don't allow for any tactical decisions. An Infinite Rebounds based quiz is uniform, which is kind to the serious quizzer who is fed up of artificial ways to inject drama into quizzes. "Showy" quizzes have disruptive rounds such as buzzers, rounds with very uneven scoring, which may be fun for the audience, but painful for the good teams on stage. But IR can be a tad boring and monotonous. All teams need to do is to focus on the next question, and not worry about any kind of tactics, except for in the odd long connect. It's a classical format, but one for the purists.

Worse, a theme quiz can aggravate these problems further because not everyone is keen on the subject of the quiz. Round-and-round-the-mulberry bush can put you off to zzz-land.

I wanted the format to:

1. Have equal weightage for all three topics
2. Force teams to make a few tactical decisions throughout the quiz
3. Not overly penalise teams who aren't good at any one topic; conversely, don't make it possible for teams who are good at only one theme to get lucky (say, by somehow getting all the questions on one theme in a mixed set)

I chose three separate "sets", one per topic. To normalise performance across sets, teams would get points in a range, depending on their performance in that set. Initially, I thought of assigning scores from 1 to 6 based on position. But that would be unfair if a team completely swept the round - the others still wouldn't be too far away. We have been experimenting with different scoring methods in our BC theme quizzes, so I chose to go for the relative method. The winner of a set gets 5 points; the rest get a score from 0 to 5, relative to the winner's score. So if the winner had 100, they get 5. If the next team gets 80, they end with a relative score of (80/100)*5 = 4. A team gets 65? - a score of 3.25.

The winner would be the team that gets the maximum aggregate across all three sets. This sounded fine, until I realised the flaw.

What if the same team single-handedly won the first two sets? They would have 10, and no one else could catch them. The race for top spot would be over 2/3rds of the way! So I put in a final-within-a-final concept. The teams with the top two scores after the three sets would make it to this last round (as it turned out, I put 3 teams in the finals as 2nd and 3rd were closely clustered). That way, I could ensure interest would remain alive till the end of the three sets. Also, this gave trailing teams a chance to catch up, especially if they could dominate the last round and push the others back.

I designed each set to be identical - after playing around with ideas, I settled on starting with 4 common qns of 5 pts each (10 pts each could allow teams to get a huge lead), followed by IR for 10 qns (initially, I wanted at least 12 so that all 6 teams would be assured of at least 2 qns each, but changed my mind since I had so many common qns).

The last 2 qns (10 pts each) would be for one individual per team. Each person on a team had to take part in a set of their choice. This was one of the tactical questions in the quiz.

I wanted to try this because I think it gives each person a chance to shine, as well as makes it hard for teams to hide a weak member. We have a system where the top 6 teams after the prelims qualify outright, while the next 3 teams are split up and each member added to these 6. In this case, I allowed the teams (in ascending order of scores) to pick a member. Normally, teams would have picked the best possible person (hence, went from lowest to highest, to have somewhat balanced teams), but in this case, they would also have to weigh in the need to have three people with complementary skills.

The other tactical questions:

1. Each team got 1 attempt to go for an answer "out of turn" i.e. you can whisper the answer to the QM without waiting for your chance in IR. I usually keep this to prevent inadvertent sitters which can penalise other teams. The top 2 teams got an additional chance (to compensate for their late chances to pick their 'drafts'). Since teams had only 1 or 2 "out of turn"-ers in the entire quiz, they had to decide when to use it and when to guess that teams ahead of them would be unable to answer.
2. The final round for the top teams had 6 questions, 2 in each topic. Ordinarily, they would get 10 for a correct answer. They could choose to double if confident, with a penalty of -5.

It was interesting to watch teams apply these at various points. I think the rules weren't as confusing as initially feared!

I must confess that the last round could be a little unfair to a team that swept all three sets only to lose in the small last round. My hope was that I would choose questions of equal weight that would reflect the finals and not distort the final standings (not entirely successful in reality). That said, I was prepared to tolerate some unfairness (it was easy as I wasn't participating :-)). I also realised that it is very easy to engineer a close finish if you have very few questions - a common trick employed by most of the 'show pony' quizzes.

Finally, a mention that the 4 starter qns were set around the old game of 'Name, Place, Animal, Thing' and that even the prelims had three sets of 8 qns each. And despite the ineptness of my local photocopy guy, it is probably the first ever horizontal prelims sheet!

The making of "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood" - 1

It may be a tad conceited to write about the making of a quiz, but since this was the hardest quiz that I have ever set, I thought it would be interesting to write about the lessons learnt and decisions taken along the way.

The genesis of this quiz was in a bad cricket quiz that I participated in with Harish and others earlier this year. I hadn't been to a good cricket quiz in a long time and felt it was a pity this was such a bad quiz that taught me nothing new or interesting. I had the idea of a "Religions of India" quiz, about cricket, films, and politics. I had never participated in a formal quiz about Indian politics. The closest was a lovely BC quiz by Ganesh Hegde (always the quizzer, never the dancer). I pitched the idea to Harish, but soon, I had begun to form some strange ideas about the format. I requested him to let me go ahead with this alone.

I was wary of doing it alone because I did not (still don't) know a lot about Indian cricket. I had a reasonable interest in politics, but only of the last two decades. Hindi films was much easier (or so I thought). In the end, I estimate it took me about 100 days worth of reading, thinking, and setting to come up with the quiz. I have always been over-enthusiastic about setting quizzes, perhaps to the point of obsession. I spent a great deal of time coming up with my last BC open quiz last November. I guess I like the creative elements of the setting: the anxieties of not having quiz-worthy content, poring over formats and presentations, composing the written parts of the question to be both devious and subtle, and so on.

This time, I had decided not to simply dip my toes into subjects (as sometimes happens in general quiz-settings). Rather, I would try and dive deep by reading as many original sources as possible in the three topics. Setting general quizzes is easier because I collect little nuggets of possibilities each day, from just keeping my eyes and ears open. Come general quiz time, I always have something to begin from. In this case, I was starting with the tank on empty.

My last BC open quiz was hugely complicated - each of the 42 questions seemed to be made up of 2-3 sub-questions. In addition, my experiments with the elims format, a semi-final for the draft picks, elims scoring etc. seemed to make matters worse. I labeled it the "No Smoking" quiz, in reference to the then released Anurag Kashyap film of seemingly equal complexity! I had not intended it to be so much of an indulgent trip, and it provoked some soul-searching. Using the feedback from that quiz and other experiences, I decided the following:

1. Content: keep it as simple as possible, especially since the themes are off-beat. Will stick to post-Independence India.
2. Format: continue to experiment

Content
As a quizzer, each year, I'm astonished at how much we don't know. As a quiz-setter, I'm astonished to discover newer quiz-worthy things to ask. If we ever feel that we've run out of questions, then we're just not looking hard enough. I hoped to convey this very feeling to anyone who came to this quiz wondering what could be asked in these three topics.

I did not want to refer to any specialist quiz books for inspiration. The only option was to read and to do so in copious amounts. I had about three-four months left for my quiz, so I began with the topic I was most ignorant of: Politics.

Long before I planned my quiz, I had bought Ramchandra Guha's India after Gandhi. It is a bit of a tome, but it told me a lot about post-Independence India. Definitely recommended for everyone, especially since we have very few books about 1947 and later. I also read a book about Kashmir Frontline Kashmir by a former BBC correspondent and Cutouts, Caste, and Cine-Stars (by Vasanthi), which is about TN politics. I re-read parts of Vaibhav Purandare's book about the Shiv Sena. Using some hooks from these books, I read a lot of articles online. I had a little bit of a 'quota system' in order to represent both different eras as well as regions, so based on what I already knew, I looked up articles about specific people and groups.

I've come to realise that even the good cricket quizzers don't seem to know a great deal about Indian cricket. Admittedly, it is a very niche topic and potentially, a dry one. Hence, I chose to primarily go for interesting anecdotes rather than stats. A failing of sports quizzes is that they become too personality or stat-oriented. I tried to avoid these. Despite that, 7 of the 8 elims questions on cricket were answered by cricketer's names! I let that be because most of these questions were largely about anecdotes.

BTW, I also did some reading about cricket. Some sources for these: Spin and Other Turns (R. Guha once again), Sandeep Bamzai's book on Bombay cricket, books by Sunil Gavaskar, Tendulkar's biography (Purandare again), Indian cricket controversies - a bitchy book that I found via Google Books, and of course, the dependable Cricinfo archives.

Thankfully, teams on stage could grapple with questions on both politics and cricket.

Hindi films, something that I'm interested in, turned out to be very slippery at the end. I had left it for late, since I thought I had enough resources and jottings to see me through. I was mistaken. I wanted to ask mainstream Bollywood, so few or no questions on parallel cinema (which has been an easier quizzing fount). I looked at some of the books I owned on this topic, looked at my notes from the Encylopaedia of Indian Cinema, foraged around online, and in the end, just thought of films I owned or had seen. I wanted to have a fairly high percentage of A/V (a first for me, since I am never confident that the supporting audio/visual technology at the quizzing venue will hold up). In the end, I just about made the minimum cut.

This is already a big post, so jottings on the format in a following article.

BCQC March Open - QuiZeitgeist - QM's report

(Also see this report)

A decent turn-out for the quiz (27 teams). Good to see many new faces and some old stalwarts like Amit Garde and Manish Manke. Just like my last year's quiz, the top three spots were decided in the last few questions, it was exciting to watch with top positions changing intermittently.

Amit Garde was in great form, as he with some able support from Aditya and Kaustubh managed to just edge out the other two strong teams marshalled by Ramanand and Niranjan. The other teams also had their moments answering some tough questions.

The audience interaction was enjoyable, with our extra finances resulting in some good prizes for them. Also I noticed that the audience was more enthused by the special rounds, than the normal IR rounds.

Another aspect was that the quiz went off quite peacefully, with no acrimony among the teams or with the quizmaster :), a welcome trend after a few arguments etc in previous quizzes.

One drawback from my side was the intermittent changing of passing order of the questions,it could have been avoided. Also a few questions were perceived as sitters, though there has hardly been any quizzes without sitters, but still as a QM one doesn't feel good about that.It is a fine line actually, because on the other hand no one likes vague and obscure questions.

Thankfully there were no complaints of chestnuts, I am sure if one scrutinizes closely, some question fundaes would have appeared in quizzes before. But if it is not so obvious it is fine with me.

A few thoughts on some of the modifications that were there in this quiz.

1. Three member teams in the finals added to the thrill, as quite a few of the questions especially connects were cracked through teamwork.

2. There was an advantage to the top two teams from the elims who had a two question lead in the finals. This was to make the elims more meaningful, rather than it being treated just as a elimination which should be its secondary purpose, it should be treated as a written round prior to the final. As a written round has the advantage of equal competition.

Why there are so many chestnuts in quizzes

Look at any of our reports, and chances are that you will find a few complaints about "chestnuts". Since this is a quiz blog, a question before we proceed:

In “The Broken Sword”, a forgotten melodrama by William Dimond (1816), one of the characters, Captain Xavier, is forever telling the same jokes, over and over, with slight variations.

As he repeats a certain joke involving a tree, this time making it about a cork tree, Xavier is corrected by his companion Pablo, who says, “A ---. I have heard you tell the joke twenty-seven times, and I am sure it was a ---.”

What?

Question from Amnesia 2006

BTW, apart from being the answer, the above question itself has become somewhat of a 'chestnut', i.e. an oft repeated question. Since most people think of chestnuts as nice questions that simply show up from time to time, let us also expand the scope to ordinary "repeats", which true to their name, have a nasty habit of showing up at the very next quiz.

1. Roach quizzers
Like international cricketers, the average age of local quizzers has gone up considerably. Earlier, most participants would be in college and once released into the real world, the concerns of a livelihood would ensure their graceful withdrawal from the scene. However, these days, quizzers keep coming back for more, and some are into their 2nd or 3rd decade (of quizzing). This means that many participants are very experienced and have accumulated quite a bit of memory trash. Most complaints of repeats would emanate from this lot. They are not dinosaurs as they can still be fleet-flooted and also possess a sharp set of teeth, and can make life tough for the newbie quizmaster.

2. Newly evolving quiz-setters
On the other hand, the number of first-time quiz-setters remains steady, which means that the number of people discovering a chestnut for the first-time remains constant. It reminds me of the first time I did a quiz at the BC. Scarcely had I uttered 3 words that people gave out the answer, and to rub it in, they also predicted the rest of the question and told me exactly what was wrong with it. Just a routine matter of history repeating itself. There's an easy way of getting around it (which is what I did): attend as many quizzes as you can, especially when you're young and willing to expose yourself to the rubbish that passes for many quizzes, and you will learn what to pick and what to leave behind in the shell. Unfortunately, it has been my observation that not enough quiz-setters do this. It is fine if you aren't crazy enough to want to travel to Tristan da Cunha for a quiz, but it may expose you to the risk of repeating questions when in your audience is the crack team of "Tryst of the Cunhas".

3. Too many open quizzes
Allied to problem 1. Open quizzes leave the door open for ancient riff-raff to hobble through. In Pune, most decent quizzes tend to be open quizzes, which is nice for the avid quizzer who no longer commands a frayed identity card, but can be difficult for newbie quiz-setters who just don't have the range or experience to keep these geriatrics at bay. Most open quizzes, locally, started off life as college quizzes and evolved into opens since quizzers wanted to keep coming back and also because quiz-setters do want to have these so-called "good quizzers" attempting their quizzes. This can be a mixed bag.

4. Laziness
Admit it: when it's 4 am in the morning and you have just 5 hours left (assuming sleep is an optional accessory) before your quiz begins, what do you do? You filch. Or else, you scrape wikipedia. With the former, seeing why repeats happen doesn't require borrowing neurons from Holmes. With the latter, I think the chances that you will search for something about which you are are already aware of is pretty high, unless you really get lucky with Random Page. You end up on something interesting which a few millions (ok, tens) of people have just heard last weekend. The solution is simple: finish setting your quiz well in advance and don't treat it like any average academic assignment.

5. Just don't have the range of interests
Similar to 4, but more pardonable. Many quizzers, especially in a given circle, share very similar tendencies, either by virtue of being quizzing-oriented or by picking up and sharing interests. As a result, their questions tend to swim in the same part of the ocean, leading to a lot of inbreeding (sometimes leading to the birth of freak connects!) As a result, their quizzes are liable to stagnate in repeats or variants there of. Breaking out is not easy and may require a conscious effort to genuinely broaden one's horizons, while deepening one's knowledge of familiar ponds.

6. Culture and geography
Over a period of time, certain quizzing circles become fond of certain subjects. People from outside these circles may not, therefore, share the depth of common knowledge that ages into chestnuts, and could therefore unsuspectingly inflict a repeat. This is hard to avoid and unless you can visit quizzes in other lands, or at least get hold of those questions, there isn't much to cover your rear here.

7. Weak sources
If you set a lot of questions from current affairs or use similar sources to others, you're setting yourself up for deja vu. It's easy to see why. Like in 5, go find other things to ask, different avenues to pursue, newer aspects to explore. New and interesting pieces of trivia are born each week, but I've seen some people waste them by asking them too early. I tend to hang on to these, and try asking them when they've aged a bit and started to sidle out of people's heads. I've noticed that the older it is before people discover them, the more interesting it seems to get - because that piece of trivia has been out fanning itself in the sun under everyone's noses, you may provoke that rare expression of joy: "darn, I didn't know this about that!"

8. Not enough creativity
It is possible to ask a known piece of trivia if you can be a little more clever with how you "remix" it. There are many possibilities: connects and visual forms, to name a couple.

9. Sheer bad luck
Almost every quiz-setter who has been hugging an interesting question close in anticipation of asking it next week has felt the deflating emotion of seeing the question show up today. One even groans unfairly: I could have done it better. This happens all the time and sometimes there just isn't an explanation. It's like all those scientists who wait a thousand years before figuring out a new theory within minutes of each other and spend the next millennia squabbling over credit. The worst case that I have known was when we had a BC session a couple of hours before Niranjan's Mensa quiz in 1999. About two or three questions from that session showed up in the finals to everyone's (perhaps apart from the quizmaster's) amusement.

The same happens when people feel that the questions seem to suspiciously emanate from a source. Even if there isn't a conscious effort to filch, perhaps the source for both was the same. If indeed there is no smoke without fire, don't worry about this one.

In summary, without repeating myself, repeats will happen. A fundamental trait of quizzers is that they also tend to be cribbers. The cribbers, especially experienced ones, could probably show some leniency if some of the reasons are traced to pardonable offences. The quiz-setters could, in turn, take every possible pain to avoid the common pitfalls listed above if they are really serious about avoiding repeats. I hate going to quizzes where most of the quiz is reincarnated, for one does not get anything out of that experience. Furthermore, it turns the outcome into a lottery, depending on which team gets a chestnut to swat away directly. I strongly feel that several open quizzes, especially those done by colleges, should not be "open" to all - less experienced college quiz-setters should joust with their counterparts instead of having to contend with the more experienced. One could argue that the better quizzers do come out stronger but I think it also affects the development of others, including the sometimes scalded quiz-setter. But I don't see it changing any soon. So if your quiz is open, then be prepared to be measured on the same scale as other open quizzes.

(Written with not-so fond memories of the COEP first year workshop, where the threat of the nightmarish "repitt" cast a pall over the semesters. Also, I have also surely indulged in the kind of 'cribbage' criticised above.)

July 2007 BC Open Quiz - Report

Date: 1 July, 2007
Venue: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, PSPL

Set by: Ganesh Hegde and Shivaji Marella
Conducted by: Ganesh Hegde
Theme: General

Quiz Final Results

(60 seamless IR)

1st: Sudarshan Purohit + J. Ramanand (A) - 100 - (Elims: 23.5)

2nd: Kunal Sawardekar + B.V.Harish Kumar (E) - 90 - (Elims: 24)

Jt 3rd: Niranjan Pedanekar + Meghashyam Shirodkar (F) - 80 - (Elims: 20)
Jt 3rd: Manish Manke + Abhishek Nagaraj (C) - 80 - (Elims: 17.5)

5th: Daniel Ghevarghese + Anubhav Chatterjee (A) - 50 - (Elims: 20)

6th: Salil Bijur + Harsh Ketkar - 40 - (Elims: 20.5)

Elims cutoff: 17.5 out of 35

Best school prizes: Mayuresh+Nikhil (Muktangan), Aastha+Anmol (Indian School, Al-Ghubra)

Best college team: Kaustubh Bhat + Aditya Gadre

Best newbies: Nilay Puntambekar + Rohit Khaladkar

Attended by: about 25 teams

Notes

Ganesh and Shivaji provided a very nice quiz last Sunday, covering different areas and asking some good questions. A few questions were a little eyebrow-raising in their arbit-ness, but overall, it was very good. Shivaji couldn't make it to the quiz. So Ganesh conducted the entire quiz, and did so with commendable patience, especially for one who hasn't really done many formal quizzes before.

The final was a tight affair with at least 4 teams in the hunt throughout. Ganesh will hopefully post the questions before leaving for his post-grad studies. The Shivaji-Ganesh pair first came into prominence with their shock 2nd place in Verve 2000, and have been stealth hunters on the circuit ever since. Good luck to Ganesh for the days ahead. Thanks to everyone who participated, despite the heavy rains that hit these parts that weekend.

Our next open quiz will be in September.

As usual, please leave comments if you have any feedback.

Tag cloud of themes:

arts(1) biz(2) ent-misc(1) ety(3) films-india(2)
films-west(6) gen(9) geo(7) history(10) india(3)
lit(2) military(4) music-west(3) myth(3) pol(1)
scitech(5) sports(12) tv(2)

(note: some questions have been tagged with multiple tags; don't have a roll-up to more general categories such as Entertainment. Though Sports seems the highest, the quiz didn't have any bad skews overall, with many of the sports questions being part of multi-tagged questions.)

Making quizzes popular

We at the BC are constantly asking questions: what makes quizzes good, what made a *good* quiz good, why do we quiz, why don't more people in Pune quiz, and what can we do to help spread the fun and cheer that we get out of this sport.

One such introspection provoked this post by Salil, which received a lot of feedback. A discussion amongst some of us much later also elicited a lot of comments. Salil has put together some of the key extracts of the later discussion (featured below; read the link above for the original set of comments). As you may know, we organise open quizzes once in every two months and we'd like to know what you think of the content in our quizzes, whether you find the quizzes interesting, and what you look for in quizzes. General suggestions welcome too.

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Following are from a thread of discussion on attracting more people for our formal quizzes and making them more popular.

Shamanth:

If I were a first time quizzer, I'd expect to be able to answer a few questions, and at least be able to relate to most of the others. Now, judging from the low scores of first time teams in BC quizzes past and present, I'm afraid not too much of that is happening.

If we want people to come back for our quizzes, we'll need to make the quizzes more answerable. Now, I've set aam-junta quizzes – quizzes for first timers a couple of times – and I'm clear that to set a quiz that everyone can enjoy, answer and relate to, does NOT necessarily involve dumbing down of questions – you do NOT have to ask 'how many sisters-in-law does Mrs Agarwal have in KKKKusum?'. You can ask a question about KKKusum/Himesh/pop-culture and still keep it workable. That would be something a KKusum/Himesh fan would appreciate the same way that BC regulars would applaud a involved-literature/history/60s-movie question.

To reach out to a first timer AND pique his interest, we need put in questions that aren't obvious, aren't direct, but are in the area of his interests, and are such that he can figure the answers out very easily, so he at least stays back for the finals, and comes back to the next quiz.

We need to look at who we are setting questions for. What I'd suggest is to have(in the prelims), say, 20 questions targeted at regular BC quizzers, and say 15 at newcomers – the latter comprising of nice, easily workable, non-factual questions on topics that would still interest a non-quizzer – say cricket, Indian history, politics, current affairs, non-intricate business. I know our quizzes comprise questions on these topics already, but most questions aren't easy enough for a first timer.

Yes, there're going to be voices that we're pandering to aam-junta, that we'll become populist, and that we don't need to give 'grace marks'. But hey, quizzing is a two way activity – like I said, we always need to keep in mind who we are setting the quizzes for. And besides, we aren't altering our style of quizzing, we're still staying true to our essence, which is to ask workable questions and stay away from factual recollection based questions.

We need to convey to people why we enjoy quizzing, and for the same reason we think they will enjoy quizzing too. Yes, we can merely say let-them-come-if-they-are-interested, but they simply wont show up if they cant make head or tail of the first quiz they go – I myself remember being almost put off while watching a greek-and-norse-myth filled quiz back in my first year of college.

Besides, 'elitism' is overrated – a lot of the times, all it entails is recollection of a petered funda, that we simply happen to know because we've been quizzing for a long time. First timers who are well read, but simply haven't quizzed before wouldn't do particularly well in a lot of our quizzes, simply because they aren't in touch with our quizzing repertoire.

In the comparison with Bangalore-Chennai we could look at the Landmark-Odyssey quizzes, that regularly see 500+ teams taking part(of 3 members). They've 40 question prelims, and at least 10 of those are the sort that everyone can answer. Finals of course are different, and comprise what we at the BC would call standard questions. However, finals still have some quantity of local/pop-culture questions that are tough to figure out, so the audience relates to it once the answer is out.

I don't know if you should call it a dumbing-down as much as a setting-questions-for-the-audience-you-cater-to.

Abhishek:

I agree with Shamanth.
[...]
A common question I ask is, has my mom heard about the answer while setting a newbie quiz - and that helps me remove some biases that are natural once one has quizzed for a long time.

Shamanth:

Yes - this is a nice way of looking at it. It's a very good criteria for picking newbie questions. Perhaps, in addition to this - 'Would my mom be able to answer this question? If not immediately, at least after some prompting and clue-dropping?' would do well.

Harish:

A thumb rule like this can and should be applied to all questions and not just the newbie questions.
Any quiz which does not cater to the lowest common denominator of the audience is not a good quiz. And this has nothing to do with dumbness etc. There are so many Qs in Niranjan's quiz which are in the so called areas of specialities of so many of our 'recognized' quizzers...you can check how many were actually cracked by those guys.
[...]
Having only seamless rounds with infinite rebounds, while being fair to quizzers on stage is not very audience friendly - it is drab. Rounds like the Chakravyuh round or buzzers or negatives make it interesting. I know it is difficult for such suggestions to pass through the standard format of our quizzes.

Siddharth Dani:

One of the toughest things to do is to try and convince a non-quizzer that he would prolly enjoy going to a quiz because he will prolly increase his knowledge of topics he may not have too much knowledge about or that he will get an ego boost by seeing that he really can answer a few "up his alley questions" or just happen to pick up a nice goodie or some cash. (The goodie/cash thing does work sometimes).

Shamanth:

[I]n Landmark/Odyssey, you do not have 500(or even 300) teams of quizzers. Of these 400-500 teams, only 40-50 will have quizzed with some amount of regularity - most of the teams are family teams - parents and a kid or dad and two kids types.

They just come because they think it's a nice way to spend a weekend afternoon. Now that impression is inculcated simply because Landmark used to put publicity(and majorly) in schools and colleges. Also, people like it because it always has questions that they could answer and get a few right, and win audience prizes - there's lots of audience prizes in it. Besides, there're prizes like best team name and best school team prizes, so hajaar junta show up.

It clicked because they put in enormous publicity the first time, and made a lovely quiz. The first edition, I'm told, did not see that huge a response. Because it was a brilliant quiz, people told friends, who showed up the next year and it grew.

Speaking for me personally, it was a major influence - to see that sort of crowds, and that number of people having fun, and finally being able to answer questions in my first attempt at quizzing drew me. My first Landmark quiz was in my first year when I hadnt done any sort of quizzing, when hostel junta who'd quizzed in school told me to try it and that it'd be fun. I was pretty overawed by the entire experience.

I dont see why that sort of thing cant be done here. Get crowds - make sure they enjoy themselves, and they'll not only come back, they'll bring friends along.

Kunal Thakar:

I am not very sure about this (above mentioned) approach of asking questions.

If we stick to asking questions where the answers are known, this is going to stagnate the quizzing scene for sure. There will be more depth but the questions will heavily favour the zeitgeist. Asking new trivia or venturing into new areas which aren't known to everyone isn't a bad thing.

Having said that, I do believe that we need to make our quizzes more audience friendly. IMO, the most popular quizzes I have seen in Pune have been conducted by [...] Derek, Pickbrain and Parnab. Whatever be said of their questions, it can't be denied that the audience loves the stupid humour, the excitement created by the jumping QM etc. Infact, Parnab quizzes are super arbit but they ensure good turnouts because of his excellent dramatic skills.

Sudarshan:

1. Question topics and wording:

I had feedback from a total newbie, non-techie person this time :
My wife. Though she's a cricket buff, her reaction to nearly all of the questions was that 'they simply go over one's head' because of the cryptic phrasing.
We need a few simply-worded, straightforward questions in both the elims and finals. They don't have to be easy to *answer*, just easy to *understand*.

One suggestion : Let's have two people organizing each open quiz. There are definitely enough people willing to do it. There'll be more questions to choose from, some amount of editing and reviewing, and some checks on questions that look simple to the creator but are verbose/abtruse.

2. Getting more people :

I second Shamanth's point about the massive publicity and word-of-mouth generating the crowds. Look at Crossword's so-called 'sale' which features a single shelf of books at 10% off - but look at the publicity they give it, and the people that go consequently. We need something to make new people know about BCQC.

3. Making quizzes more enjoyable overall :

- Make it a point to have questions with humorous answers/fundas, and more straightforward audio-visuals. Audience interest needn't be generated by jumping up and down or needling the participants - accessible humour, movies, and music are more longlasting ways.

- Abhishek, your flash template for quizzes is really good. Do you think you can add some bits of animation in there? Such as fades between questions, perhaps flashing numbers when the score changes, a special screen to dislpay scores ?

- Audience questions are definitely a good idea. Audience questions with straightforward A/V identifies are easy to do and are best to pull people in.

- Let's also think of different prizes for people rather than throwing normal chocolates at them. Keychains? 10-buck coupons for pepsi? Pens? Comic books? Think cute, fun, envy-inducing on a low budget.

Ramanand:

* Acc. to me, I'd like to help popularise quizzing as "a intellectually stimulating recreational sport". I don't know how many people are inclined towards something like this - re: the point that Dani makes. But in general, IMO, the most enthusiastic quizzers are "geeks", where geeks are defined as people who are passionate about something in great depth. It may be sports or films or music or books, but talk to them and soon they're spouting love-poems to their favourites. Some of my friends, non-quizzers, are in this category and I find them being fascinated by certain aspects of quizzing when I share questions with them. We need to at least attract and retain these. We also learn a lot from these people in turn.

* I feel we should "enable" everybody who wants to quiz or thinks they can quiz to participate. Our model of no fees, walk-ins etc. is perfect for this. But mere enabling is not sufficient as you have all pointed out. We will continue to tweak our "offerings" - hopefully, every change is designed to achieve something.

* I don't like the idea that we have to necessarily dangle carrots-on-steroids to get >100 teams. [D]o we really want all those ppl who come in only for prizes? Not IMHO. But we do want to make it a happy activity for those 80 coming for the content. We really want to be the pleasant domestic life of quizzing in these parts, not an annual one night stand. If we can also get to do the grand-nights-of-passion sometime, then fine - but I won't lose sleep over it.

* In addition to quizzes having some questions even for the (lowest common denominator), I feel the overall quiz should be pitched at the average participant, not at outwitting the (alleged) best participants.

* It should ideally have topics from a wide range AND the quiz host should be good at those topics - enough to be able to speak about the question and related context. This is hard to achieve. We know that many of us cannot claim wide-ranging interests. But we cannot get the few who seem to have wider ranges to do quizzes each time. So, if you want to be a good QM, then you have got to genuinely broaden your own horizons. Ensuring breadth by picking up questions from elsewhere won't help for long.

* Let's face it: we know exactly what certain QMs are likely to ask. And the QMs exacerbate this "incest" by hardly changing their pet themes over different quizzes. In fact, QMs must take pleasure in outwitting participants who think they know exactly how this pitch is going to behave.

* My personal subjective requirements from quizzes these days:
- breadth of topics (some familiar topics, some new that I can learn about)
-indulging pet themes of QMs fine, but only if the expectation from the quizzer is of fairly universal things to think about
- occasional reusability of old things - old wine in new and astonishing bottles
- workable, but not very esoterically so
- elims reflecting finals
- as far as possible, equidistance of topics to new and old quizzer alike - v. hard to achieve
- lack of sitters - but qm needs to be "aware" of recent quizzes
- Niranjan's idea of survivability of qn - a balance of clues to be given out and held back

* I'm not so concerned abt the number of people showing up increasing each time. [...] But we need to do the "retention" bit. I think colleges and schools should continue to be our highest priority for I feel that grown-ups have already now settled into some sort of recreational pattern and there's not that much of a dent possible unlike with the kids.

My suggestions:
* Give out trivia quizzes/trivia puzzles during the finals. Let audience guys look at that when they're bored. Perhaps the content can be related to the elims/finals questions. They can take it home, mail in answers, and we give prizes.
* What are your views on the Theme Attic thing? I think it's a mistake to get people to write down answers all together. Perhaps we should have ppl call out answers for each qn instead? Person doing it can pick the newbies first instead of oldhands, and give them chocs. Otherwise, ppl may snooze off.
* We should get more feedback from participants. Perhaps we should put up a feedback form on the website too.

* I've noticed ppl, especially kids, leave qns blank. Since guess-work is the framework of most of our successes, perhaps we should incentivise this somehow (look at me spout economics ;-)) - perhaps have -ves if no. of blanks exceeds 5. Yes, ppl will probably write nonsense, but perhaps some will be forced to think +vely

:: Salil

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Chakravyuuh 2007 - Report

Date: 14 Apr, 2007
Venue: COEP

Open Quiz
Set by: Abhishek Nagaraj, Aditya Gadre, Gaurav Singh and others from COEP
Theme: General

Quiz Final Results
(48 seamless IR + 1 written connect qn + 6 direct speciality questions
1st: Kunal Sawardekar + Shamanth Rao (A) - 115* (won on better elims score)
2nd: Amit Varma + Sumant Srivathsan (D) - 115
3rd: A.P.Alagarsamy + Prasann Potdar (B) - 70
Jt 4th: J. Ramanand + B.V.Harish Kumar (F) - 55
Jt 4th: Samrat Sengupta + Salil Bijur (C) - 55
6th: Meghashyam Shirodkar + Aditya Udas (E) - 40

Quiz Elims Results
(cutoff: 19/30 qns)
Samrat + Salil - 22
Kunal + Shamanth, Meghashyam + Udas - 20
Amit + Sumant, Alagarsamy + Prasann, Ramanand + Harish - 19
Dhananjay Shettigar + Amit Pandeya were also on 19, but missed out on starred qns.

Solo Entertainment quiz: (set by Aditya Gadre and Kaustubh Bhat): won by Aditya Udas

Report

* The open quiz saw good attendance (I guess ~30 teams).
* A good and interesting elims. One or two could have been better designed and some dropped, but overall, was good. Was a very tight qualifiers too.
* Quiz started with a single written connect made up of 12 visual elements showed one by one. This was followed by 24 qns of regular IR. Then a set of 30 qns on different topics, of which 6 were offered as directs to the teams. This was part of the chakravyuuh round.
* Was a little disappointed with the finals content. The coverage of the questions and the design of the chakravyuuh round left a bit to be desired, IMO (see tag cloud).
* Nevertheless, there were some good questions such as the aussie guidelines qns. Moments of "should have got that" abounded. * Good organisation and effort overall, though the sound-and-light limitations of the COEP auditorium vis a vis the PSPL audi is harder to adjust to these days.

Please leave comments on this post if you have any suggestions, criticisms, corrections to offer.

Tag cloud of themes:

biz cricket eng_films eng_music etymology football
gen geo hindi_films history ind_films
ind_music india lit misc misc_ent music scitech
sports tv

(note: some questions have been tagged with multiple tags; don't have a roll-up to more general categories such as Entertainment; one question is not included as I don't remember the answer;)

March 2007 BC Open Quiz - QM's (Harish) notes

(See the report on the quiz)

Some of the objectives I had set for this quiz:

1. Set a new precedent for the BCQC Open in terms of production values.
2. Increase the audience involvement during the finals.
3. Questions to be framed in such a way that every team 'type' (those who prefer to work it out; those who know a lot; those who just guess) should have an equal chance.
4. Introduce areas which have not been covered till date without losing out on the interest levels.
5. Make the quiz more interesting with new rounds/formats.

Some notes:

1. Low turnout for the quiz. We need to get the scheduling right and the QMs need to focus their energies on retaining those who do turn up.

2. Very low scoring elims. Lot of questions in the finals went unanswered. JR - can you confirm the number? (JR: 13 out of 36, seamless questions only) I don't agree with Anand's diagnosis - as mentioned in his comment. But we need to think about it.

3. The Speciality round should have been better thought out and executed. 5-pointers would have been a better idea but as Siddhu says hindsight is always 20:20. I don't think couple of teams not getting the same number of directs as the others makes the quiz any less equal. It is just that the format is different. I am also not so much 'For' this equalizing/normalizing of the scoring/format. Drama is what will make the audience interested and the audience is what will keep the club and the quizzing continue. In fact, I'd say if we have to give an edge, let the leading edge go to the audience rather than the quizzers on stage. As long as 70% of the quiz comprises of good questions, the quizzers will be happy (read will return for the next quiz) but if the audience (the not-so-regular quizzers and those who don't qualify) is not happy with the quiz, they will not return for the next quiz. Hitting the golden median is a moving target - I don't think we can achieve it. The next best alternative is to provide enough likeable points for all the stakeholders to ensure they come back and get more people with them.

4. The Bid round, on hindsight again, didn't seem to have elements of equal weight/importance. Could have done a lot better on those Qs. It is a format that can be tried out but as JR says, it is a very tricky one. Getting Connects right will probably be the subject of a Mel Gibson movie.

5. I was satisfied with the effort put in and on a broad basis, the feedback I have got - during the quiz and even after the quiz, has been in line with my evaluation.

6. I hope this quiz makes other QMs think more on how to make the quizzes more interesting and that we should treat these Open quizzes as an opportunity to pit their product against the Landmarks, BEQs and Crucibles of the world. Those quizzes, whether we agree or not, have a certain brand value associated and lot of it has got to do with the effort that goes into it.

7. We should also be aware of the possibility of Landmark and PSPL pulling out of this because of lack of participation, interest levels and lack of quality (!?). We have to work towards avoiding this situation and in fact make the Open quizzes so good that they attract more sponsors and more audience and more quizzers. I don't know if I have succedded in any respect with W5H 2007 but I hope others think about it and do a good job of it.

8. The last and the most frustating aspect of the Open quizzes that irks me no end - at the end of the quiz, I see chocolate wrappers and other litter thrown all over the stage area. JR does the clean-up probably because he knows the effort that went in to get the PSPL folks to give us the Audi and thus, knows the value of it. Let's show some more civic sense. (JR: hopefully, I'd do that at other places too! :-))

The Mod Mod Infinite Rebounds

Ages ago, I'd written a post on Infinite Rebounds as part of a series discussing scoring formats in quizzes. That post has a couple of errors which came to notice in time, and is slightly obsolete now. This current post aims to correct those errors and record the current set of conventions that are followed in IR (at least in the BC circles). This post is also partly aimed at perhaps reaching a consensus on how we should run this method here - it is after all the most popular form of conducting a quiz in these parts - so as to avoid the usual raised eyebrows just before the finals of a quiz begin when the quizmaster announces his nth variation.

Infinite Rebounds a.k.a. Infinite Bounds (IR) is one of the algorithms to answer the timeless quizzing question of "who gets the next question?". One answer is in these commonly agreed conventions is IR:

(Some terms and abbreviations:
* Q{n-1} : the previous question which has been completed
* Q{n} : the next question which is to be asked
* S: the team that successfully answered Q{n-1}
* P: the team that started Q{n-1}
* Normal passing direction: The usual passing order that a quiz begins with i.e. A->B->...->F->A...
* Reverse: F->E->...->A->F...
* S-1(P-1): the team seated "before" S(P) in the Normal passing direction
* S+1(P+1): the team seated "after" S(P) in the Normal passing direction
)

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Rule 1. Q{n} after Q{n-1} was correctly answered: The choice of the team to receive Q{n} depends on how Q{n-1} was answered. If Q{n-1} was answered correctly by a team S, Q{n} goes to S+1.

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Analysis:
* IR attempts to keep things "fair" for all teams by keeping the number of attempts on questions as equal as possible. "Equality" not only over the entire length of a quiz, but also over short windows of time. In IR, this means that at any point, no team will have an unfairly greater number of attempts at questions than any other team.
* We know that the fairest possible system is for all teams to simultaneously attempt all questions. But this is not possible for all questions in a stage-final-format, and so every algorithm needs to address where a question starts and how it passes. Here 'fairness' means for teams to at least attempt almost, if not exactly, the same number of questions. For this, one needs to also convince oneself that theoretically there is no difference between attempting a question on the direct or on a pass.
* In earlier systems like Direct-and-Pass, some teams could enjoy several more attempts than others in a single round. Perhaps over the length of the quiz, the teams may have similar number of attempts, but in a local window, this will not be true.
* A Team is not penalised for sitting next to a "good" team that gobbles up all questions before they can get to it.
* IR always increments the next question marker, ensuring that no team can get an attempt again unless all teams after it have had one attempt since.
* We can state the fundamental principle of IR as: "keep the number of attempts equal". Earlier, we thought it would make sense to re-start next to the team that last got points. But on reflection, this is not quite correct.

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Rule 2. Q{n} after Q{n-1} was not correctly answered:
(Before modification) If Q{n-1} went through unanswered, Q{n} will go to P+1 i.e. the team next to the one that started the previous question.
(Modification 1) If Q{n-1} went unanswered, Q{n} goes back to P i.e. the same team with which the previous question started.

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Analysis:
* Earlier, it was felt that no team should start a question twice in a row. However, if we want to keep the number of attempts equal, then here the old rule violated the principle. This is because the team that started the last question is now pushed to the end of the new cycle. Unless the question is unanswered by the rest, this team loses an attempt while the others gain one.
* Applying the modification ensures that at any given point in the quiz, no team can have more than 1 additional attempts over any other team in the final. (Having "1 more" means that the other teams will attempt questions to square the count before this team can increment its count.) In the previous system, this could not be ensured. In fact, data shows that a difference of 2 or more is often seen with the older system.
* This modification is as simple to run, and more importantly, it does not penalise a team just because the quiz-setter asked a tough question that none of the teams could answer.

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Rule 3. Next question after partial points:
(Before modification) Sometimes a question is made up of multiple sub-answers. Suppose such a question Q{n-1} is attempted by all teams, some of which who give partial correct answers. At the end, the quiz-master awards partial points to those teams with correct contributions. In this case, who gets Q{n}? Previously, the question would be awarded to the team next in passing order to the last team to get points.
(Modification 2) Here, since all teams have attempted the previous question, the question heads back again to P.
(There is no consensus on this point)

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Analysis:
* Again, the previous system believed in re-starting next to the team that last got points. Instead, if we appeal to the spirit of the principle of equal attempts, Q{n} should go back to P, as everyone's had an attempt on the previous question.

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Rule 4. Next question after round reversal: A question is asked and completed. The order of passing now reverses. Who gets the next question? If modification #1 is implemented and if the last question was unanswered, then Q{n} goes back to P. This is a trivial case. In all the other cases, there have been several variations here and no consensus has really emerged. The variations:

* Q{n} is given to S-1 (or P+1 in case no modification is applied) and the passing is in Reverse
* Q{n} is given to S+1 and the passing then Reverses
* Breaking with IR here, Q{n} starts at the other extreme i.e. Team F (assuming the previous half started with Team A)

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Analysis:
* It seems to me that each of the above rules have their pros and cons, and hence their respective advocates. None of these seem to be able to give any firm guarantees, so I think this much dissimilarity in number of attempts can be tolerated. Perhaps the best way is to toss a coin and pick the starting team in each segment randomly. Random is better than Bad :-)

The rest of the 'philosophical' aspects can be read in the previous posts. I hope to bring out the emphasis on the "equality in number of attempts" to help guide all minor quibbles. Of course, there is no intention of imposing some kind of standard, but perhaps leading to a convention that say most open quizzes in Pune and even Bombay can adopt. My personal basket of conventions would be to include both the modifications on points 2 and 3. Hopefully, quizmasters will think clearly about the options available to them instead of making an arbitrary and dogmatic choice. Of course, there are those who say IR is dogma :-), but it's the best we've got at the moment, is it not?

Kindly comment on issues.

P.S.: I remarked that "theoretically, there is no difference between attempting a question on the direct or on a pass". This is not quite true. In fact, practically, there is a difference between all teams when they attempt. The earlier you attempt a question, you have less to work with from answers previously given, but you also benefit from lack of "Forward Bias" (example embedded in this post). But overall, does it matter? I think not.

P.P.S: Apologies for the use of short-forms etc. etc. - all in the name of brevity (esp. if you consider the size of this post!).

P.^3.S: Special mention of Arnold D'Souza (as promised) for independently re-discovering modification #1 in Pune circles :-)

Small Note

Dunno if everyone has seen this but Anand has a comphrehensive review of the March Open that he and Vibhendu did up on his blog. He has detailed numerical analysis and personal opinions about each teams showing. Excellent, detailed and precise. Do see.

Formats of Rounds - II

Update (25 Dec 2006): See this post for an update on this subject. Some obsolete/incorrect portions have been struck off. In continuation to Formats of Rounds - I

Infinite Rebounds

Since Direct and Passing doesn't work in its usual form for reasons noted before, it has quickly been replaced by the Infinite Rebounds system as the de facto quizzing format in all the good quizzes. A caveat here is that of the qualifier "good quizzes", as a great many "popular" quizzes aren't aware of this system, or if they are, choose to shy away from employing it - an exploration later.

The commonly agreed conventions of Infinite Rebounds:

1. The choice of the team to receive the next question depends on how the previous question was answered. If the previous question was answered by a team, the next one is put to the team next in order from it. Alternately, if it went unanswered, the new question is simply advanced to the team next to the one that first received the last question.

   As an example, consider six teams A to F. Say a question starts with Team B. Turns are taken in order to attempt answers and Team E eventually answers correctly. In this case Team F would receive the next question. In case the question was left unanswered, Team C would receive first crack at the next question.

2. No question may be posed first to the same team twice in a row. (More elaboration on this later in this post.)

3. The beginning of a new round does not require resetting of the asking order i.e. unlike in the D&P method, each round does not start with the same team or does not have a predecided beginning point. An element of randomness appears in this system as it is not evident who would have answered the last question of the preceding round. This prevents a great deal of rigging (nothing can prevent quizmasters "choosing" their questions, of course, but it hampers rigging when the sequence of questions is already embedded in a visual presentation as is usually the case these days).

4. Each question has the same value for the correct answer.

5. No question in the rounds with using the Infinite Rebounds system has penalties i.e. no negative scoring for wrong answers.

According to me, the whole philosophy of Infinite Rebounds can be summed up with the sentence: Be as fair as possible to the participants. That is really the crux of the structure. If another system which is even better at being fair is possible, I don't have any doubts that it will replace Infinite Rebounds as we know it today.

I'd like to spend some more time further examining the implications of the above conventions. The point about the equal value and penalties aren't really a fundamental part of the structure of Infinite Rebounds, which is after all a set of rules for passing. However, they do conform to the spirit behind encouraging the use of this collection of rules - so they've been bundled up under the same banner. If someone so desired, a system of different values for direct and for passed questions may be employed, or points subtracted for guessing wildly thus inhibiting the choice to dare an answer, but that would bring what I like to think of as Instant Recoil (it can be seen on the faces of experienced quizzers on stage and looks as if they've swallowed a raccoon, and by the immediate broadcast of this feeling to fellow quizzers around).

The first rule presents the main algorithm of the format. It gets rid of one of the fundamental problems of the D&P method where a team could get a passed question correct and then a direct one for itself, boosting its tally without other teams having had a say in proceedings. Infinite Rebounds puts the team with the last correct answer at the end of the queue, forcing the movement of the "first attempt marker" to constantly circulate (the "first attempt marker" indicates how teams got first crack at a question). Additionally, this implicitly provides an element of randomness that is very useful in preventing many of the known methods of "black magic" that happens at quizzes :-). Teams also need not be very glum about having drawn seats next to so-called "studs" that in the D&P method would've eaten up much of the food supply of questions. Instead, such a team may be rewarded for its position, as it could potentially get many more first shots at questions. This one fact is enough to serve as an endorsement of this format over the conventional system. The clinching factor is that on most occasions, the team that has given the most correct answers wins. Of course, the number of correct answers is a factor of the number of attempts a team receives. There are cases where among two equally balanced teams slug it out and one team sneaks through because it got more questions to answer than its principal rival, but both teams will agree that it wasn't because the system did them in - the winners still had to provide more correct answers than the runners-up. Contrast this with the D&P team where quite often in a tight contest, the winning team could've had lesser attempts, lesser number of correct answers and still win.

The second point in the list, the one about not giving first attempt of a question to the same team twice in a row, requires some elucidation. Such a case may not be readily apparent. This can happen when (taking an example) say, Team B gets the next question in a round. They can't answer it and it passes normally till Team A (the last team in line for that question) answers it correctly. Now, by the normal passing rule which simply states that the team next in order to the one that got the last answer gets the new one, Team B would again gets a chance at the question. Since much of Infinite Rebounds is in protest of the injustices of the D&P method where this occurence is common and hated, it makes sense to prevent this as a special case and advance the first attempt marker to Team C. This would ensure that things aren't stuck at Team B's end.

Even if some do not agree with this point, it does make sense if one considers the spirit of the Infinite Rebounds philosophy. I speak from personal experience. In 2002, Swapnil did a quiz (called "NQuirer"?) at the BC. We got into this exact situation, and my team was in the position of Team B and would've benefited as we were not doing very well and needed every question we could get. Since this was quite a new situation (for some reason, no one at the BC had ever made a special note of this scenario), it wasn't quite clear who would get the next question, us or the team next to us. Many of the "learned figures", Harish and Niranjan quickly spotted the solution (the obvious one) i.e. we shouldn't get the chance. We (or rather me, since I was the senior guy in my team, so musn't pull Anup Mankar or Amrish into this), in a fit of silly gamesmanship, insisted that there was no rule or precedence governing this, and we should get it. I don't recall what was decided (most likely, it went against us by consensus, as I usually don't get my way at the BC ;-) ), but it did throw up a case for which we had no convention to govern. I will be the first to admit I was wrong that day and to avoid this situation in future, I like to make a special mention of it. That's why all these words are spent on it, so as to avoid acrimony in the use of such a splendid system as this.

For some incomprehensible reason, Infinite Rebounds isn't yet the universal standard for the conduct of general rounds of quizzes ("general" as in normal passing rounds that don't have any special funk such as Rapid Fire or Single Specialities etc.). It is inexplicable that even veteran quizhosts hang on to the D&P method for dear life. Either they are ignorant about it, or do not have the intellect to comprehend it (which must make it a pea-sized intellect), or they must be resisting its use. I don't claim to say that I can conclusively prove it is a fairer system than any other, but experience, personal and among the fraternity is overwhelmingly positive about it, or atleast in rejecting the conventional system. I also suspect some of the ancient quizhosts perceive a sense of having to give up their dignity and adopt a newer system; perhaps it would undermine all their previous quizzes. What else would explain one quiz organizer (a veteran quizzer himself) completely rejecting Infinite Rebounds and describing it as (paraphrased) "nonsense"? Unless he knew something we didn't. Would you hang on to a fast-eroding prestige by being stubborn or be fair to the participants? I think a great deal of quizzing inconsistencies are because these reputed quizmasters don't spend enough time thinking about their conduct of their quizzes and prefer keeping the show audience-centric rather than participant-centric. I don't buy the argument that Infinite Rebounds is hard to conduct; in fact it makes life easier. The usual points of confusion for someone conducting a quiz are how much does the team that just got the correct answer get in terms of points and who gets the next question. Both these are easy to answer in this format: everyone gets the same number of points each time and one just has to remember the last correct answer and/or the last starting point. As in many other walks of life, simple is elegant.

In an effort to try comparing and evaluating the efficacy of the two popular methods, Niranjan wrote a small simulation whose source code (in C) he posted on Inquizitive - apparently he's improved it since. It would make even more sense to run it with actual data from live quizzes rather than just test data, so some of us are trying to record actual sequences - I managed to do so from the last quiz I conducted, an internal office event called Pulse. I still haven't run the data against the sim. If anyone's interested in the code, just leave a comment behind here.

To summarise, I think since Infinite Rebounds is both widely accepted and perceived to be fair, its use must be encouraged all around. If somehow it can be introduced into the school quizzing circuit, it would expose kids to that at an earlier stage. Otherwise, it remains something of an elitist choice, but one that definitely exposes a badly organized quiz from the others. Of course, the most ideally fair way to hold a quiz is to allow everyone to attempt the same questions simultaneously and then the one who gets the most correct answers wins. This is obviously not possible in a "final-on-stage" situation. We can only get algorithms that approach that optimal solution. Infinite Rebounds is definitely here to stay as one such solution that is an excellent substitute for the practical conduct of a quiz.

Comments/Criticisms/Commendations/Contributions welcome as usual