Interrobang

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 questions 1 , 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 ...

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 industr...

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...

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 reas...

(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 ...

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. R...

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...

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. 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 e...

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 int...

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 t...

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...

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 : 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 th...