The Quizbowl Resource Center

Ike

Chris Ray at Terrapin 2016 is a pretty legendary upset notwithstanding its recency. Great moments involve Chris literally licking his lips as the science tossup in finals 2 was being read before he completely shafted Max on that question, Chris beating John Lawrence to a music question using his &qu...

Ike

I think the entire point of the community question clinic was to make it so that editors didn't have to give a lot of feedback systematically, and to let the members of the community who really feel up to it give some helpful tips to new / budding writers. The truth of the matter is it takes a lot o...

Ike

Hey, so the community question clinic seems to have fired back up and I think that's great. One thing I'd like to point out is that writers should take some of the advice here with a grain of salt. Indeed, most of the advice is quite good and are things that writers, old and new, should be mindful o...

Ike

Bala, I don't meant this to be condescending, bu you haven't edited any packet submission tournaments to know anything about what new writers do and don't do. I hope that if you're ever science editor, you receive the same tossup on packets and Code Division Multiple Access that I did, and you come ...

Ike

This was pretty entertaining and hilarious! My personal favorite moment was being woned in teh face by the three-deep conspiracy tossup on "The Plan to retake D.C. from black people," which assumes you are a believer of the too deep conspiracy theory that D.C. is currently being run by bla...

Ike

Personal class notes. These are especially pernicious because they give the illusion of accuracy and unambiguousness. Another reason why this can be bad if you don't look up the clue is that professors very often make up terms for convenience, that are not "real" terms and are used only i...

Ike

I never advocated writing any questions using just Wikipedia, but perhaps a warning should be added about that. I am standing by my position that using only personal class notes is a really bad idea -- clues should definitely be verified with multiple sources. This post was vague about its target a...

Ike

I don't know about biology in specific, but if you're writing submissions for the categories of science that I do, I would much, much, much, much, prefer that you use class notes and lectures slides over something like wikipedia. One of the problems with this post is that it's not obvious who it's g...

Ike

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:I'm down to play this. Don't expect me to buzz on much.

Fixed the obvious typo.

I'm down to play this too.

Ike

I agree that the Ursell's clue is less suggestive / harder than the blowholes clue, and I've swapped them out already. But I really can't understand the substance of the pneumatic clue - it makes sense to talk about the pneumatic behavior of waves, and in fact it's not such an uncommon term - my tex...

Ike

Cheynem wrote:How many packets does ICT require?

18

Ike

I would hardly think of mocking Jordan, and I do think his overall point is (presumably) fine. However, he offered some inaccurate points to support his argument on this Hugo piece, and I wanted to clarify them, my broader point being that sometimes there are seemingly hard or obscure things that a...

Ike

One of my least favorite trends in quizbowl discussion is trying to dig on the specifics of an overall point, especially when the conclusion is valid! By which I mean, I think Jordan has a very good argument about this tournament's literature, and that he chose some examples that I disagree with, bu...

Ike

Since it's apparently too much to ask people to trust my deep understanding of and connection with the playing field, here is my heuristic for team permissibility: I mentally sort good literature players into four tiers of increasing size. A handful of people make up Tier 1 and Tier 2. I won't allo...

Ike

I doubt anyone is taking a high schooler's claims seriously, but there is a jab at the question quality from someone who doesn't really know anything: while there are certainly variable bonuses in this set (as you can find in any set!), and some of the tossups do have problems, it's certainly not so...

Ike

I don't see how shorelines is at any point acceptable. Especially on the berms clue. Can someone post it please? While I really have no interest in defending this tossup, I will point out that it's a contradiction to suggest "this tossup was so transparent to everybody" and then to immedia...

Ike

Ewan MacAulay wrote:Our team negged the "decryption" tossup with "factorisation" on the clue about Shor's algorithm - could the clue made more specific?

Sorry that has been fixed. I missed that earlier.

Ike

Sorry I've been away from this for a while. The answer line should definitely include other answers like "logic expressions" or "logic circuits", since these are also common terms for the same thing in this context. No, you're wrong. In particular, all of these algorithms only w...

Ike

Sorry I've been away from this for a while. The answer line should definitely include other answers like "logic expressions" or "logic circuits", since these are also common terms for the same thing in this context. No, you're wrong. In particular, all of these algorithms only wo...

Ike

15. In Sam Lloyd’s treatise about the “eighth book” of these objects, he presents a paradox involving two monks of similar size made of these objects, one of which has a leg, the other of which does not. The Western counterpart to these objects are called the stomachion, which are used to complete ...

Ike

1/ One of my teammates buzzed in with "magic" for the alchemy tossup at the Hermes Trismegistus clue; should the tossup have a prompt on that? Obviously, all of the previous clues point unambiguously to alchemy, but I was wondering if alchemy should be considered a subset of magic. Possib...

Ike

I disagree with a lot of these critiques, and I really don't see the point of this thread. Quizbowl is rife with simplifications, and thats OK and by design. I don't know what the original poster's intention here is, but at least one of these critiques, and maybe more, are made just "for fun.&q...

Ike

ThisIsMyUsername wrote:(And also to summarize my favorite upset that I've been involved in: beating Weiner, Ted, Eric, and Cody at KABO. But I decided against that, since it would just have been an account of which tossups we got, and how angry Ted and Weiner got.)

Don't let that stop you!

Ike

The point of this scheme is to collect money the week before the tournament so that come tournament day, we can get started ASAP, and not spend 30 minutes (1 round!) of time moping around. I hope you can pay me by Venmo. If you can't, please have your teammate or someone else pay for me. It would be...

Ike

Yeah, and I don't plan on implementing / even thinking of a plan unless we need one because I'm not too happy about the idea. To be clear, the arguments I heard about restricted field size were a combination of 1.) I want to be able to hear the packet we wrote and 2.) We should try to have more comp...

Ike

Cheynem wrote:Would the idea be to cap the field size at CO? How would you determine who should be allowed to play?

I don't want to get down this path unless it's what people really want. Someone will get hurt and I see no reason to create any hard feelings unless we have to.

Ike

This is a terrible scheme to implement at ACF Fall and don't do it. I don't think anyone is saying that we should, but just in case someone is suggesting that, don't do it. I too am sympathetic Eliza's point - the problem of this scheme alienating new teams. To clarify, I don't think that the issue ...

Ike

Thanks for the feedback so far. The high level summary of my post is that I'm going to be implementing a discount policy based on quality of submissions whether you like it or not. The implementation details are up for debate but due to some of the excellent points the posters in this thread have br...

Ike

As you may have heard, I'm head editing this year's Chicago Open. For this year's iteration of our deathmatch, I want to introduce a policy of some sort that will incentivize quality submissions. Because the proposal below is somewhat radical, I wanted to discuss it and get people's various thoughts...

Ike

To pile onto what Rob said: If I were editing this particular clue for any tournament, I would have re-arranged it to be less negbaity. Will, I've blasted you many times for writing questions that are not entirely player friendly, such as the "British Empire" tossup, and I think this type ...

Ike

There are two travel stories that merit note in this thread, though I don't remember all the details of either. Illinois sent 3 teams to the 2009 SCT at Indiana Univeristy. For many reasons, this was one of the worst tournaments I ever played, but I'll stick to the travel part of it here. I awoke a...

Ike

I made that same neg, as you might remember, but I don't think it's the fault of the question - buzzing in on the assumption that the clue's talking about the most famous Nochlin work involves taking a risk. Still, it's true that a fuller description might have been more helpful (since I have actua...

Ike

In brief, this (which I may not have made entirely clear in said initial post): I didn't originate the use of "they" and explicitly told writers to use alternatives; when I did find instances of "they" used as an identifier (or edited by others into questions), I weeded them out...

Ike

I read the the game Tejas went off. He went 13-2-2. Joe Nutter went 2-0-0. Tejas and Joe Nutter powered every tossup in the second half over Chris Ray.

Ike

Ike

York negged the female nudes tossup with "women artists" on the namedrop of Nochlin, I think. He probably just brain farted the pronoun, but it makes me curious to see the wording of the question. Could you post it? Did the same thing here. I'd like to see this as well. _________ I just w...

Ike

Okay, So thank you so much for writing this. I have been wanting to play one of these for a while, and this exceeded expectations. I'll begin by saying that we agreed to have no negs, but you were still locked out after interrupting, at the main site for this tournament, which I think was a wise dec...

Ike

This was a lot of fun - just a reminder that quizbowl is a lot more fun without that biology crap.

Sid Dogra: 0

Also don't forget that Sid didn't win his first game until Sunday.

Ike

A+. This was a lot of fun. I may have feedback, but I'll email you guys about it. Again, this was great!

Ike

Auks Ran Ova wrote:We are indeed discussing this at the moment, and have been for days.

Is there a place where various members of the community who are not board staff can publicly or privately drop off their two-cents?

Ike

No it's not obviously ridiculous. If you allow say, Greek myth 8/8 per a tournament and QM 2/2, Greek myth takes up more space question per question than QM. And that's not even taking into account the fact that textbooks have diagrams, pictures, appendices, introductions, and indices, and good ol' ...

Ike

Regarding distributional tweaking as a whole, I think people should be quite careful how and when they apply it. In particular, the idea that "each tournament is only one tournament" is not exactly true; some tournaments (like each year's big spring open, for example) are much more reason...

Ike

So I've been reading this thread for a while now with a mixture of amusement, horror, and wonder, and I want to separate out the comments in this thread into two specific sets of problems: Set 1: stuff about poor question quality, poor pay rates, flying out of incompetent moderators, etc. I think th...

Ike

Oh man, there's so much to talk about in this thread, but I'll try to keep it short. I think there is room in quizbowl for asking more about computery things. I don't necessarily think it has to come out of the science distribution since a lot of these topics aren't really about science. These topic...

Ike

I'm really only approaching this from a generalist perspective. I get Isaac's point about ~The American Beaver~, but I think we as a game have largely moved pass asking about the same old musty tomes over and over again - or at least if we have they are done much more sparingly. My overall point is ...

Ike

Put another way, my point is that myth gets a ton of exposure in real life. What Thinker A at University B wrote about Topic C in Book D with Topic C in its title, on the other hand, does not. I don't see why we should quantify how much exposure of a category there should be based on the entire pos...

Ike

I'm going to side with Stephen Liu on this myth debacle. I've written Lord knows how many mythology questions and I just don't feel that it's really that stale, or at least, stale enough to the point where we need to devote a significant chunk of mythology to mythography. Also, I'm not sure about yo...

Ike

stuff about matroids I'm going to go out on a limb here and actually defend the idea of this question. I had encountered matroids and have clued them before, so this tossup didn't strike me as that hard. I'm not sure if I would write a whole tossup on them, but I probably would make it a hard / med...

Ike

Definitely the best general trash set I have ever played! I had a lot of fun, whatever you guys did, do it again!

Ike

it is fine to toss up these things (because they are obviously things worth knowing in this form), you just should add "Composer and genre required" tags, be generally mindful of the fact that these questions are harder to follow, and tailor your clues accordingly, rather than just going ...

Ike

it is fine to toss up these things (because they are obviously things worth knowing in this form), you just should add "Composer and genre required" tags, be generally mindful of the fact that these questions are harder to follow, and tailor your clues accordingly, rather than just going ...

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