The Quizbowl Resource Center

Excelsior (smack)

Since Lederberg stats will probably be a relevant factor for evaluation, I should point out that I shadowed Sriram _way_ more than he shadowed me - most of my buzzes (and negs) were in physics/other, which Sriram would've gotten soon after (I mean, Sriram is a physics major, after all), whereas a si...

Excelsior (smack)

Can I just point out that it's ridiculous that _nobody_ voted for Sriram? Sriram is, at minimum, the third best science player in the game right now, and I'd personally put him even with Billy. Fourth, but that doesn't really mean much. Being good at science doesn't mean you're a top 25 player if y...

Excelsior (smack)

Can I just point out that it's ridiculous that _nobody_ voted for Sriram? Sriram is, at minimum, the third best science player in the game right now, and I'd personally put him even with Billy. EDIT: This causes an especially weird effect in the case of Yale. Voters put Yale ahead of Penn but ranked...

Excelsior (smack)

Ashvin, of course, the server logs + the impossible levels of improvement in stats are completely damning. The only reason people (Ike) are bringing up his defense of how he knew X Y and Z is not to argue that he must be guilty, but to openly mock him, because mocking deranged cheaters is fun. The ...

Excelsior (smack)

I mean, basically the point I'm trying to make here is that there isn't really any value in making claims like "he couldn't possibly have buzzed there; that's too difficult!". We know that he engaged in unethical behavior not because he buzzed early in some questions where you would not ex...

Excelsior (smack)

So, I am just going to list some facts and fact-like entities here. -Contra Ike, it's not _that_ ridiculous that someone could know about phantom references. I encountered a passing reference to them in some blog post about weakrefs in various languages, and I'm sure there are other reasons one coul...

Excelsior (smack)

Hey, so I'm an utter pleb when it comes to music, but:

Charlie wrote:Marcato - "marked," is related to accents and represented by a line over the notes. Can be combined with staccato, but again, that is very common

Isn't a marcato a ^ and a tenuto a _?

Excelsior (smack)

The volatility question was my doing. I don't really have anything to say in defense of it, because I literally don't know the first thing about financial economics. Sorry about that.

Excelsior (smack)

Oh, yes, definitely. SQBS should only be a stopgap until such a time as we have a better data interchange format. Jonah, is a specification for LiveStat and/or code that handles LiveStat-formatted data available publically? If so, could you point us to it? I've looked at Chris Carter's proposal ( To...

Excelsior (smack)

As I mentioned in the previous thread, I would definitely be willing to commit some time to these projects (starting in June or so). Unfortunately, I'm more of a back-end guy, too, but yeah. As another Python guy I'd like to cast a vote for Django over Node, for the same reasons you mention. Assumin...

Excelsior (smack)

Obviously, I haven't thought about the tournament schedule as deeply as Matt Weiner et al have, so I'm guessing the answer is yes, but: was it necessary to adopt a tournament schedule in which some packets (e.g. the Michigan packet) were used during multiple rounds? This seems like a recipe for disa...

Excelsior (smack)

This set was lots of fun. I particularly enjoyed the other science and the parts of the social science I was familiar with. Commendations are due to the editors for producing a darned good set. I am pleased that this year's incarnation of ACF Nationals did not feature Bruce or a Bruce-like-entity li...

Excelsior (smack)

Adding some brief thoughts onto what Ike said: Machine learning - pretty solid. Java - concur with Ike that the first half of the tossup is kind of meh. As Ike points out, tossups on individual programming languages are not the greatest idea. polynomial factorization - the bits and pieces of this th...

Excelsior (smack)

Thanks to Eric for allowing me to write for this, and special thanks for being so understanding when I had to back out of half my commitment when real life intervened. My questions that made it into the set were on: numerical integration, a math common link on "smooth", the heat equation ...

Excelsior (smack)

A+ tournament; would undergo mind-wipe and play again. My brain was kind of fried by the time we started playing Lederberg, so I don't really have anything in the way of substantive commentary other than to say that I enjoyed this tournament a lot. (also, I will pay you the dollars you are owed once...

Excelsior (smack)

I'm going to be employed in the Madison, WI area come fall and am not planning on being back in school for at least a year or two. I imagine I will still play (resp. staff) nearby open (resp. closed) tournaments for a while, or at least until the weather kills me. I don't know if high school quizbow...

Excelsior (smack)

Absent a thread for physics or other science, I will post about those things here instead. (Go ahead and migrate this to a topic-specific thread if somebody makes one.) I felt that the physics was all around decent in this tournament. There were some rather good questions - position, magnetic flux (...

Excelsior (smack)

Hm, okay. In my experience, the term "darshan" is used for the actual act of reverence, such as touching the feet of a priest or idol, but I'm willing to chalk this up to me not understanding the spiritual implications of the physical act.

Excelsior (smack)

I've thought about the microstates bonus part a bit, and I still don't think there's any way I would be able to come up with "microstates" after hearing that. This might just be because I'm dumb, though, so maybe check with some other people to see what they thought about it?

Excelsior (smack)

Can someone post the religion bonus from round 5 that went aarti / something / darshanam? Something seemed bizarre about the wording of the last part of that.

Excelsior (smack)

I enjoyed the increased proportion of EEB questions in this tournament, but at the same time would be opposed to seeing those topics receive significantly increased representation in all tournaments. Your questions on these topics were very interesting, and the ones I knew anything about seemed good...

Excelsior (smack)

I found the psychology, economics, and economics-like questions about which I knew anything at all (GDP, advertising, tenure, lobotomy, a couple others) to be uniformly enjoyable and well-executed. The same is true of the "modern world" questions subject to the same caveat (Airbus, immigra...

Excelsior (smack)

To make Matt Weiner's good advice more concrete, it appears that OSU will be hosting the Minnesota Undergraduate Tournament (which is a relatively easy tournament for undergraduates) at some point in April. If, by then, you have found some other people who want to play quizbowl with you, you should ...

Excelsior (smack)

UC always gets a ton of people from the greater Cincinnati area who have played OAC or some other quizbowl-like substance in high school, so you shouldn't be lacking for members if you can advertise effectively. Brandon Williams is probably the best high school player currently at UC, and there have...

Excelsior (smack)

This is awesome! (In retrospect, I can't believe nobody had thought of this before, seeing as it makes _so_ much sense!)

Excelsior (smack)

Thanks to Raj Kesavan for alerting me to this thread. I had been working on a Ginseng-like project for collaborative question editing, and I've gotten maybe halfway to something usable before I had to shelve it to focus on my editing work. You can find what exists of it here: https://github.com/gra...

Excelsior (smack)

Indeed he did: link. It appears to be updated to include everything up to and including SCT.

Excelsior (smack)

Garuda Oh, this is awesome. I haven't looked over your code in detail (though I probably will do so at some point), but here are some brief thoughts about the points you raised: Security - I don't think that making per-site installations easy is something that is worth spending too much time on. I ...

Excelsior (smack)

I would like to reiterate what Evan said - Seth's and Jerry's (and especially Seth's) input was tremendously useful for the categories I ostensibly edited, and if anything about the physics and other science wasn't bad, that's why. (But the blame for anything terrible in those categories still falls...

Excelsior (smack)

This tournament is occurring. We are starting round 5 (out of 7) of the prelims, after which we will rebracket and things like that. Stats may appear after this round. EDIT (1:30 pm): Round 6 (post-lunch) is about to begin. Once prelims are over, the house team will collapse and we will rebracket in...

Excelsior (smack)

Any such project would have the inherent flaw of leaving access available to the questions to whoever is hosting the site. Well, in principle, it is possible to encrypt everything client-side so that the server operator never sees any of your data (cf. for example Mega.co.nz), though this still req...

Excelsior (smack)

I would like to play CO with some people who I have not played quizbowl with before, and who would like to shoot for a finish somewhere in the third or fourth quintile of the field. As usual, I know some things about science and little else.

Excelsior (smack)

If all questions are written/edited before you assemble packets, it's much faster to put questions in by subject instead of by game. For a 10-round set, cut and paste the 10 chemistry questions in, one per round, from round 1 to round 10. Then the 10 bio, or 10 US hist, or whatever. Doing it that w...

Excelsior (smack)

I don't know what other people's experience with writing tournaments is, but in my four years of BHSAT, I have found it to be the Worst Thing. Perhaps the only thing less pleasant than writing chemistry questions for high-schoolers is _assembling_ those questions into an actual packet set. This bein...

Excelsior (smack)

The request for mirrors stated clearly that hosts were not allowed to interfere with packets. You are missing the point, which is that it is entirely possible that a reasonable person could construe "power until three lines" as "not interfering with packets". Surely you aren't c...

Excelsior (smack)

Another thing to consider: every year when we at Yale run our A-set tournament, we skip all the computational math questions. Imagine that we had never asked NAQT for permission to do this.* This, to my mind, is a far more egregious change to a set than the mere addition of length-based powermarks. ...

Excelsior (smack)

The problem with the arbitrary decision is that what if mirror A wants to make it every 3 lines, and mirror B wants to do "old-style NSC" powers? I'm not seeing why this is an issue for basically any tournament besides SCT, which is the only multi-site tournament that _requires_ that fiel...

Excelsior (smack)

Okay, another question: suppose somebody runs a tournament on an unpowermarked housewrite and decides, for whatever reason, that they want to implement "old NSC-style" powers, in which you receive power for a correct answer at any point before "For 10 points" is read. I have litt...

Excelsior (smack)

Auxiliary questions: should tournaments be able to use bouncebacks without receiving explicit authorization from the editors? Should tournaments be able to take an already-powermarked set and run it with NSC scoring (20-point powers, 0-point negs)? Can a powermarked set be played without powers? Wh...

Excelsior (smack)

If you add powers when there aren't any, it's power-marked, whether you actually edit the documents or not. Well, no, I don't think that the producer of a set has (or should have) the power to specify what scoring system tournaments should use, which is effectively what you are suggesting here. Mor...

Excelsior (smack)

My only major general complaints were science-related. I was underwhelmed by the chemistry: there was a heavy focus on things like scientific instruments or lab techniques, and less on actual chemistry. That glass tossup was classified as chemistry, I'm pretty sure. It wasn't. Then there were quest...

Excelsior (smack)

For the record, I had literally no idea that this kerfuffle occurred, have no recollection at this time of answering this question, and was not even aware that you were talking about your match with us until you explicitly pointed it out just now. Looking at the question now, though, that's pretty l...

Excelsior (smack)

There was also a bonus in the Illinois B / Penn B packet that was on complex analysis and whose third part was something that sounded like "Rouche's theorem". This theorem is very much a thing, but I don't think it is given a name very often. Okay. I wasn't familiar with it so I trusted t...

Excelsior (smack)

Do you mean the Yale A packet? I can't find many questions with powers ending at the end of sentences. I do, yes. My memory might be off, though - it is entirely possible I saw one such question and then erroneously extrapolated to "you all suck at power-marking"; if so, sorry, my mistake.

Excelsior (smack)

I will maybe post more things later, but briefly: it is _extremely_ dubious to refer to "the set of all undecidable problems" as a "complexity class". I really enjoyed the tossup on that (at first I was thinking "oh cripes another question on either P or NP" and was ver...

Excelsior (smack)

For what it's worth, I didn't feel that any of the science was absurd or a bad idea or anything. While some of it was incredibly hard, all of it seemed interesting. I commend the people who were responsible for that. I enjoyed the high amount of statistics / numerical analysis / compsci / etc (all t...

Excelsior (smack)

100% agree with Jarret on all counts. Many thanks to Jerry and friends for putting this on.

Excelsior (smack)

I might have more to say later; briefly: the beginning of the tossup on "pressure" states "this quantity equals two-fifths times the density times the Fermi energy". You should probably specify that you're talking about a "number density", since "density" unqu...

Excelsior (smack)

When should people show up on the morning of?

Excelsior (smack)

Eyes: during lunch, we split into two rooms ("regular" and "uber-competitive" or something) and played some rounds (30 TUs in regular; 40 TUs in uber-competitive). After the tournament, we finished off the set in one room (tossups 41-100 + extras). Stats: Lunch, regular (30 tossu...

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