Interrobang

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...