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Mechanical Beasts

Also, all teams in a round robin play what amounts to the same schedule, so by trying to find the "most difficult schedule" you're "solving" a problem that doesn't even exist in your own format. While it may seem to be trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist the problem doe...

Mechanical Beasts

Software is copyrighted under the Berne Convention as a literary work as soon as it is placed in a written form. The U.S. is a member of the Berne Convention. Yes, the *software* is copyrighted, but algorithms themselves are not patentable. While it is true that the algorithm itself isn't protected...

Mechanical Beasts

I'll be TDing a mirror of the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament taking place at MIT the week after ACF Nationals (Saturday, April 23, 2011). QUESTIONS: The questions will be a mirror of the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament set produced by members of the University of Minnesota's team. TRAVEL: I d...

Mechanical Beasts

Did you not see how this was fucking crazy and completely antithetical to any idea of sportsmanship or learning or anything useful? Did you not spend ten minutes looking at the possible consequences of your tiebreaking system? Their idea wasn't sportsmanship. Their concept was sportsmanship. Their ...

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Crazy Andy Watkins, please do this without anger or emotional turmoil, print out a list of logical fallacies and examine your post. You might need to review my two previous posts while your at it. I ask you do so because you did say you were "suited up". I'm sure those professors you ment...

Mechanical Beasts

Three weeks later, a grand total of one person has signed up to write and had a writer's kit approved: thank you, Auroni Gupta, for being one of the still terribly few people to follow through on the promise they made to NAQT.

Mechanical Beasts

As requested I used the 2010 ACF Nationals to test the stat we used. To test only the stat I did no sorting based on W-L. As such the statistic was able to predict the Preliminary outcome to and overall accuracy of 71%. This is better than the calculated values for other tie breakers, and this is t...

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This will likely be the last time I post in thread as I find it a moot point to argue with people only looking to argue, which is one of the ways some people swim in faulty logic. Please do not mix what I say with an argument someone else is making. I am only one person. Please read all of what I s...

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Unfortunately, it appears that every room in every university building in Pittsburgh appears to have been booked for something called the Spring Carnival. As a consequence, ACF Nationals no longer has a home and I'm afraid we're going to have to cancel the tournament. My deepest apologies to everyo...

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I'm ashamed enough that this stats-goose-chase has lasted this long and certainly don't want it to extend into the new year. I realize I'm in somewhat of a poor position to be badgering anyone else on statistics, but in the course of finishing our own tardy stats, I took comfort that we weren't the...

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One thing I just thought of (inspired by Mike's point about metaposting rules) is this: 1. Do not make illogical or fallacious arguments is a rule. 2. Pointing out rule violations is backseat modding. 3. No backseat modding is a rule. 4. Pointing out illogical or fallacious arguments is backseat mod...

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this strict "boring material only" editing policy for the QBWiki has been something that quizbowl luminaries have been frustrated by for ages. Maybe there's a fine distinction that I'm missing between "nonboring material" and "gossipy crap that the QBWiki revision product w...

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It would be good were the QBWiki to take on some Maize Pages functionality, or were anything to. I bet people will contact me for quizbowl things long after two months ago.

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grapesmoker wrote:I don't anticipate any new registrations, so if everyone who owes a packet submits one, ACF Nationals will have 28 teams.

Would we be doing four seven team brackets into some kind of 8/6 split, or what?

Mechanical Beasts

We have 11 packets. WUHSAC played 12 rounds and had enough for finals and replacements on top of that... We cut some questions that were particularly terrible. Also the last few rounds had quite a few repeats and we scavenged these for replacements. Just to note, WUHSAC did not have three packets o...

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grapesmoker wrote:Thanks for your magnanimous leniency, we sure do appreciate it.

jerry can we have a picture of bruce in the cult facility? the peons might like it.

Mechanical Beasts

Since the last time the LaTeX cult emerged on HSQB, there have been great advances in the ability of non MS-Office software on many platforms to read MS Office formatting. There is now almost no moderator or quizbowl player who can't read a packet formatted in MS Word 2003 or 2007. I'm also not awa...

Mechanical Beasts

You guys do realize that most people don't have nor want any background in coding, right? In terms of complexity, this is nothing more than, like, formatting text. If you can click bold, you can type \textbf. It takes no background in programming to understand. But that's not much the point--the on...

Mechanical Beasts

bt_green_warbler wrote:
Morraine Man wrote:Are the "Andy Watkins editing ICT science" rumors true?
No, unless I missed a QB Tribune headline with "Seth Teitler legally changes name to 'Andy Watkins'".

Seth's the editor of all DI-level science? Or is he just a set editor with particular attention to science?

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Morraine Man wrote:Are the "Andy Watkins editing ICT science" rumors true?

I'd sure planned on playing.

How did those rumors start, anyway? I've been mind-bogglingly inactive this year, sure, but that's a pretty specific hypothesis.

Mechanical Beasts

Does anyone have tips on how to write science questions quickly? My speed right now is torpid because I haven't learned nearly enough to write half a question off my head, especially at higher levels, and at times it's very hard to figure out what exactly my sources are saying. I've found some succ...

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Ringil wrote:Playoff Stats are here: http://results.scobo.net/Umich/StatesPO2011

Wow, I have never seen a team get eight powers in a game where it barely breaks 10ppb. (Novi A against DCDS.) I couldn't imagine a more frustrating loss.

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Weiner and Vinokurov have definitely been noted for such disasters, but they seem to have been forgiven, so I hope people can see that we have moved on from our past and forgive us for what happened in the past. I'm usually not the first person to defend... really anything that has to do with Matt,...

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I was going to make a post on a rather similar subject about the NAQT letter and what's come of it. I've been the first or second set editor on IS 102, 104, and 105. This has been partially out of choice and partially out of necessity; there aren't enough man-hours to make the sets happen otherwise....

Mechanical Beasts

OK, maybe nobody will know the first few clues of the questions (surely some people will for at least a few of the questions), but if everyone is listening like they should, they'll have learned some clues for the next goddamn time they come up in another tournament. And THAT is infinitely more val...

Mechanical Beasts

graduate programs tend to be broader than you imply, like American History to 1865 or Military History Is this true? Do actual, real-life history grad students study 200 years of history or an entire type of history? I've never, ever, ever, ever heard of this. The broadest my soon-to-be chem PhD pr...

Mechanical Beasts

Only one question really bothered me, and that was the one in the VCU packet I think, where it said an aldehyde was a type of ketone. I'm pretty sure this isn't right. It was confusing enough that I didn't get it at the end of the question. An aldehyde is a ketone where one of the R groups is H, so...

Mechanical Beasts

Do people have any surprise college teams of note? I realize this is harder to do in college, but I was wondering. Would Minnesota qualify--the year they broke CBI-lock and immediately won undergrad ACF? Obviously there there wasn't as much of a totally unknown/ victory transition, but it certainly...

Mechanical Beasts

The tossup on black bodies was somewhat conspicuous compared to the rest of the physics. It seemed to cut right to the chase with fairly easy clues after the leadin; I don't know if this is a case where a less-than-fully-edited tossup made it into the set accidentally, but that's what it felt like ...

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I'm curious what sort of alternate answers were acceptable for "metastable". I negged with "excited state" on the population inversion clue, which seemed to be saying that more electrons are metastable than stable during population inversion. I have no background besides my quiz...

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Again, only 25% was UG last ICT. No one mentioned this. That's probably because you're using semantic acrobatics to make a point, rather than making a strong point. 25% of teams were undergraduate title eligible , but how many graduate students were there? Of the top ten scorers, six were graduate ...

Mechanical Beasts

The reason that baseball has consistent divisions year to year is because you play a lot of teams in the same division more than in other divisions and having regional divisions minimizes travel time. There's also some sort of historical loyalty to what the division was last year, and the year befor...

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It is the principle that is absurd. Although I understand that my opinion is of no consequence. The idea of an undergraduate team having to compete for their championship against teams with graduate players is more absurd than my assertion. Again, all that is needed is a simple question on the surv...

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grapesmoker wrote:
ieppler wrote:Staaaaaaaaaattttttttttssssssss:
http://results.scobo.net/SQBS.aspx?org= ... =standings
I like it when teams that are a short train ride away only manage to send a single person. I guess ACF Regionals is the new PARFAIT.

Thesis, man.

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Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:Why did the Northmont coach post that thing I linked to where he said it was made explicitly clear to all coaches via email that HFT was the set being used then?

That's true; I've wanted to hear some kind of follow-up on that. I'd love to see the email, certainly.

Mechanical Beasts

Right, exactly. The issue at hand is clearly not that they intentionally, systematically cheated... or Andrew's stats would have to have improved by more than ~20%. (Unless his goal was very strange indeed: "cheat blatantly, and don't do well enough to win or get very close to winning, includin...

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To give some context: Andrew's statline of 28-29 over five games (because of PACE-format powers, giving him 170 ppg; without the 20-point powers, would give him 114 ppg) is only somewhat better than how he did at Auburn (49 tossups in five games; discounting negs, that gives him 98 ppg). Comparable ...

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Ukonvasara wrote:
Gypsy punk wrote:Also, is the northeast site happening??
We're in talks with MIT. Stay tuned. It may be delayed to accommodate people inconvenienced by the late announcement date.

Any word?

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Edward Elric wrote:Well I guess we have our National Quizbowl Acts of Questionable Morality for February!

This has always been the worst month for that.

Mechanical Beasts

It's almost like you forgot that there was inclement weather that weekend. Half of the teams in that field cancelled due to parts of I-10 freezing over and whatnot. I applaud LSU for taking such a risk to get to SCT that weekend. Sectionals have been postponed due to inclement weather before, and w...

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Tell me something doesn't look out of place. Looking at these numbers, they're pretty absurd. If it is, in fact, true that A&M had someone else's team split up so they could get the autobid, I think that's borderline unethical (although not prohibited by the rules?). In any case, I think this d...

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As shown by my last edit, we are now up to seven tournaments in six states, which assuming that all mirrors are able to run this year, is as many as we had last year. We're hoping to increase that number of tournaments this year, so if you have a nascent middle school circuit or you're looking to s...

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Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast wrote:Darnit, 22+ PPB doesn't help at all if we can't win. And yeah, OSU did split teams.

I feel like having the ninth and tenth best D-values is likely to qualify you!

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Columbia B have a collective forty-nine years of quizbowl experience between them, explaining away their round one victory over Alabama A. We'll have to wait and see whether any other teams have more years of experience than Alabama.

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I do agree about that in general; I think that a CS distribution that requires such clues (though--I do think it's possible to write an SCT-level tossup on constructors without such a clue) is too big. No CS distribution requires these clues. It's just a poorly written question, is all. One too big...

Mechanical Beasts

Right, I heard "single colon separated", not just colon separated, which caused me to buzz. Well, the list of variables being initialized to values in a constructor is separated by a single colon. So even were it phrased that way, your buzz is incorrect. I have to say that I'm really not ...

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Golran wrote:Right, I heard "single colon separated", not just colon separated, which caused me to buzz.

Well, the list of variables being initialized to values in a constructor is separated by a single colon. So even were it phrased that way, your buzz is incorrect.

Mechanical Beasts

I can confirm that C++ clue. You're right about the use of the single colons with respect to derived classes (and not to constructors or, in fact, other methods, which work like Class::Method()) but that's not this.

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Possible interest from a team of Harvard freshmen as well. Updates as events warrant.

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How many other locations bid to host? There were no other bids in either region. Okay, so I'm going to conclude that Chris's characterization of the situation as "deciding" to host the tournament at Moravian is unfair. It's pretty difficult to have a bidding deadline where you just say &q...

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