The Quizbowl Resource Center

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 2:37 pm**

Hey all,

In my copious spare time, I hacked together the prototype of a Quiz Bowl robot for Google Wave named 'Quizzy.' Right now, Quizzy can fetch questions from the acfdb (I downloaded the entire archive of 12,000 questions, naively parsed it, and uploaded it to the Datastore for the Google Appengine site where Quizzy is hosted) and ask them to participants in a Wave. He automatically posts the answer, although if I get around to it later today, I'll add a command so that users can request an answer at their leisure.

My goal is to have Quizzy act like a moderator at a reputable tournament. Eventually, it will read questions one word at a time, probably at an ICT pace. Collaborators in the Wave will be able to 'buzz in' and Quizzy will recognize them, give them a chance to answer, and determine whether or not they are correct. In the future, I'd also like to add team/player functionality, and possibly build a Gadget to complement Quizzy which could act as a foundation for an entire Quiz Bowl match. Unfortunately, the Wave API hasn't quite progressed to allow these things - particularly the incremental reading of questions (my only option right now is a half-assed cron job which doesn't quite work, but the Wave guys have posted on the internet that the next API update will add better automation/scheduling functionality for Robots).

Anyways, if you want to test out Quizzy, you can do so very easily. Simply log onto Google Wave, and add '[email protected]' as a contact. Then, during any Wave, add Quizzy as a collaborator. It'll pop up and give you a few commands to use; input those commands into any blip and have fun!

Also, you can check out the source code at http://code.google.com/p/quizzy/. If you're interesting in contributing to the project, let me know! I think Google Wave is an exciting new platform to which we can port Quiz Bowl, and I hope Quizzy can serve the community some useful purpose as it develops over the next few months.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:09 pm**

Any chance you could invite me to Google Wave? This seems neat, and I'd like to try it out.
EDIT: email address: [email protected]

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:14 pm**

Echoing what William Horton said; I'd be willing to try this but would need someone to invite me, as my Wave invite application hasn't been returned yet.

(Edit: it's in my profile, but [email protected] )

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:15 pm**

AlphaQuizBowler wrote:Any chance you could invite me to Google Wave? This seems neat, and I'd like to try it out.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:19 pm**

I'll have to jump onboard the "invite please" train ([email protected]).

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:22 pm**

If I could somehow figure out how to invite people, I'd do so.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:25 pm**

Darn, I thought Wave invites had proliferated far and wide across the inter-tubes by now!

Unfortunately, I don't have any normal invites at the moment. I'll keep this post updated as I roll more features into Quizzy, and hopefully by the time the wider QB community is on Wave, it will be fully functional. Also, if/when I receive some invites, I'll let you all know. I've got Developer Sandbox preview invites, but I don't think it's appropriate if I give those out here.

By the way, for those of you who do indeed have Wave, feel free to add me as a contact - [email protected]. I'd love to test out Quizzy with other people present in the Wave so I can see what sort of collisions I get when multiple people request questions at once.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:34 pm**

roth wrote:Darn, I thought Wave invites had proliferated far and wide across the inter-tubes by now!

Unfortunately, I don't have any normal invites at the moment. I'll keep this post updated as I roll more features into Quizzy, and hopefully by the time the wider QB community is on Wave, it will be fully functional. Also, if/when I receive some invites, I'll let you all know. I've got Developer Sandbox preview invites, but I don't think it's appropriate if I give those out here.

By the way, for those of you who do indeed have Wave, feel free to add me as a contact - [email protected]. I'd love to test out Quizzy with other people present in the Wave so I can see what sort of collisions I get when multiple people request questions at once.

I've added you. The bot looks cool.

I'm [email protected]

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:51 pm**

How do you plan on solving problems like matching what the user typed to what the answer line of a question is actually looking for?

For instance, if you had an answer line like:
ANSWER: Huckleberry Finn [accept either underlined answer; accept "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" before the end of the first line; prompt on "Tom Sawyer" until mentioned]
How do you figure out what's acceptable when with a bot?
What do you do about someone who answers "Huck Fin"?

The TriviaBot on #scobowl handles these problems by creating specific formatting for the answer line, but even then it can only get so far. Spelling mistakes are counted as incorrect, and the prompting is less precise than a human. Mainly it relies on a "Gamemaster" or moderator to override answer lines if someone is right but the bot doesn't recognize it.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:56 pm**

Count me in as another person who'd be interested in trying this if I had a Google Wave account ([email protected] if you have invites to share!).

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 4:39 pm**

And I as well, as I love the scobowl bot to death.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 4:52 pm**

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:How do you plan on solving problems like matching what the user typed to what the answer line of a question is actually looking for?

For instance, if you had an answer line like:
ANSWER: Huckleberry Finn [accept either underlined answer; accept "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" before the end of the first line; prompt on "Tom Sawyer" until mentioned]
How do you figure out what's acceptable when with a bot?
What do you do about someone who answers "Huck Fin"?

The TriviaBot on #scobowl handles these problems by creating specific formatting for the answer line, but even then it can only get so far. Spelling mistakes are counted as incorrect, and the prompting is less precise than a human. Mainly it relies on a "Gamemaster" or moderator to override answer lines if someone is right but the bot doesn't recognize it.

That's the biggest problem I'm anticipating with this project.

At the moment, I don't have a nice solution in mind. it would've been nice if the acfdb stored information in another way, but as far as I can tell, there's just an answer field in each element of the database; there isn't even any underlining or anything. If the information on acceptable answers (even if just in the form of underlining the correct parts of hte answer) were available in the db, it would be very simple to figure out when answers are correct.

This will be a problem down the line, though. First, I need the Wave API to mature so that I can flesh out the rest of the bot's behavior. When the time comes to figure out how to deal with all the correct answers, I'm sure I'll think of something. One goal for the project is to simply develop a helper for people studying for quiz bowl, so if enough people are using hte robot in this fashion, I could add a feedback feature so that each time a question is asked and an answer is given, the person using the bot could submit acceptable answers back to the bot to store in its database. I don't want to crowd-source, but without some sort of meta-data in any of the qb databases, it's really the only way that 17,000 questions can be adequately modified!

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:08 pm**

Well, the TriviaBot has several sets (not as much as the databases probably) formatted in a more friendly manner. Alejandro can probably provide you with them.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:09 pm**

I think Mike is right. I don't trust this thing to judge the correctness of answers on a consistent basis.

If you wanted to have something resembling a real match, you probably would need a screen facing each team. After one team buzzes in and answers, the answer would show on their screen, and they would decide whether or not it was right, going against themselves on iffy situations (so that a protest could go in their favor after the other team had a chance to answer if the first answer actually was correct). If they marked themselves right, then the answer would show up on the other team's screen, and the other team would have a chance to protest. If they marked themselves wrong, then the other team would get a chance to finish the question. On bonuses, you could just have the other team judge the correctness of the controlling team, giving the controlling team a chance to protest.

Assuming that neither team consists of a bunch of jerks, this could all happen pretty quickly and easily. If a team does consist of a bunch of jerks, then they should stop playing quizbowl.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:38 pm**

Shcool wrote:I think Mike is right. I don't trust this thing to judge the correctness of answers on a consistent basis.

If you wanted to have something resembling a real match, you probably would need a screen facing each team. After one team buzzes in and answers, the answer would show on their screen, and they would decide whether or not it was right, going against themselves on iffy situations (so that a protest could go in their favor after the other team had a chance to answer if the first answer actually was correct). If they marked themselves right, then the answer would show up on the other team's screen, and the other team would have a chance to protest. If they marked themselves wrong, then the other team would get a chance to finish the question. On bonuses, you could just have the other team judge the correctness of the controlling team, giving the controlling team a chance to protest.

Assuming that neither team consists of a bunch of jerks, this could all happen pretty quickly and easily. If a team does consist of a bunch of jerks, then they should stop playing quizbowl.

That's an interesting idea, and one that would be very workable. I'll jot that down...

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:15 pm**

Shcool wrote:I think Mike is right. I don't trust this thing to judge the correctness of answers on a consistent basis.

If you wanted to have something resembling a real match, you probably would need a screen facing each team. After one team buzzes in and answers, the answer would show on their screen, and they would decide whether or not it was right, going against themselves on iffy situations (so that a protest could go in their favor after the other team had a chance to answer if the first answer actually was correct). If they marked themselves right, then the answer would show up on the other team's screen, and the other team would have a chance to protest. If they marked themselves wrong, then the other team would get a chance to finish the question. On bonuses, you could just have the other team judge the correctness of the controlling team, giving the controlling team a chance to protest.

Assuming that neither team consists of a bunch of jerks, this could all happen pretty quickly and easily. If a team does consist of a bunch of jerks, then they should stop playing quizbowl.

What if an answer needs to be prompted? Then the first team cannot supply more information, as they have already seen the correct answer.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 9:47 pm**

I'll re-iterate that first and foremost, Quizzy is designed to serve questions - ACF questions right now because it was very easy to download a collection of them. In the future, when the Wave API matures a bit, I'll tackle some of these issues. I think it might be very interesting to build a Gadget to compliment Quizzy which could handle the automation of the actual Quiz Bowl match - prompting for answers, managing teams/scores, etc. For the short term, though, Quizzy will just be a question/answer provider. I have a midterm in my physical meteorology course tomorrow morning, but once it's done, I'll patch Quizzy to not show any answers until the user requests to see them, and then I might try to naively check user-input answers against the stored answer to the question.

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:01 pm**

I'd like an invite, I guess. [email protected]

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:46 pm**

This is pretty intriguing, but I don't have Google Wave. [email protected]

Posted: **Tue Nov 10, 2009 11:54 pm**

Solid for now. Post updates.
wave me nalinl AT googlewave DOT com

I think Michael Hausinger randomly found me on wave?

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:01 am**

nalin wrote:Solid for now. Post updates.
wave me nalinl AT googlewave DOT com

I think Michael Hausinger randomly found me on wave?

Yeah, I'm hausingerm. I'll invite people once I have the ability to do so.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 7:51 am**

By the way, I'm IBHirsch@ gmail.com

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 8:00 am**

My account just got activated, I'll send out invites to the first n people who posted when I'm able.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 9:09 am**

I just realized I posted begging for an account but didn't post my gmail address; it's [email protected] .

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 9:17 am**

millionwaves wrote:My account just got activated, I'll send out invites to the first n people who posted when I'm able.

From what I've heard they come in 12s, but it's hard to get them. I know one guy who got 30 invites (after getting 12).

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:17 pm**

Sure, why not; [email protected]

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:36 pm**

[email protected]

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:52 pm**

This sounds awesome.
[email protected]

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 2:23 pm**

Oh, fine. [email protected]

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:06 pm**

Why the hell not. [email protected]

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:09 pm**

tirthkpatel at gmail dot com.

Thanks

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:25 pm**

[my first name] at brown dot edu

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:56 pm**

Sir Thopas wrote:[my last name] at brown dot edu

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:59 pm**

rstaraila at gmail dot com

Thanks.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 5:13 pm**

Yes please, if you may.

andrewchrz AT gmail DOT com

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 7:01 pm**

So Google graced me with about a dozen invites this afternoon; I've already promised a handful of collaborators on a separate Wave project that I'd shoot invites their way, but once they're taken care of, I should have ~6 more to give out. Hopefully tomorrow I'll confirm that everyone is on that i've invited and send invites starting at the top of the thread.

By the way, Google is activating them REALLY fast now; I had to wait two weeks after being invited to get my account, and I only got it because I was accepted into the Developer Sandbox. However, I sent my brother one last night and he's already on; I wouldn't be surprised if Google opens the entire system in the next month or so.

Posted: **Wed Nov 11, 2009 11:27 pm**

I'd like to try it.

[email redacted by request]

Posted: **Fri Nov 13, 2009 3:51 pm**

I'll beg for an invite. [email protected]

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2009 1:21 am**

Obligatory remark. [email protected]

EDIT: Got invited already!

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2009 1:41 am**

An excuse to try out Wave? How could I resist?

[email protected]

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2009 3:51 am**

I'd like to try it.

rapidflash06 a.t. gmail.com

Posted: **Sun Nov 15, 2009 6:41 pm**

Just an FYI, all Python-based robots for Wave (including Quizzy) are currently broken. Google's most recent slew of API updates have messed up the functionality which allows Python robots to create new Blips, so while Quizzy is still working behind the scenes, questions aren't currently being correctly sent to the end Wavelet.

I'll let you all know once this functionality is restored.

Posted: **Mon Nov 23, 2009 7:56 pm**

I just got allocated 8 invitations and am willing to give them to the people in the thread starting from the top, but if you already received an invite, let me know so I can go to the next person. If I don't hear anything, I'll start sending out the invitations Wednesday around 4 Eastern.

Posted: **Mon Nov 23, 2009 8:02 pm**

MicroEStudent wrote:I just got allocated 8 invitations and am willing to give them to the people in the thread starting from the top, but if you already received an invite, let me know so I can go to the next person. If I don't hear anything, I'll start sending out the invitations Wednesday around 4 Eastern.

I don't need one.

Posted: **Mon Nov 23, 2009 8:05 pm**

jonah wrote:I don't need one.

Posted: **Mon Nov 23, 2009 8:18 pm**

acvoight AT gmail.com

Posted: **Tue Nov 24, 2009 10:30 pm**

I would like an invite to this as well.

ngurramaster7744 at gmail dot com

Posted: **Tue Nov 24, 2009 11:59 pm**

I just got a google wave invite and don't need one.

Posted: **Wed Nov 25, 2009 12:43 am**

I'd like in on this. InfiniteStryker0 [a} gmail dot com

Posted: **Wed Nov 25, 2009 10:26 am**

master15625 wrote:I would like an invite to this as well.

ngurramaster7744 at gmail dot com

I got an invite to this, so I don't need another one. Thanks

The Quizbowl Resource Center

Quizzy, an Excuse for you to Try Out Google Wave

Quizzy, an Excuse for you to Try Out Google Wave

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