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The Friar

A bid from Washington University in St. Louis will be submitted by the end of the day today. Thank you.

The Friar

Like all power matching formats, this adds massive schedule imbalances, penalizes teams for winning, magnifies any seeding errors, and produces almost meaningless results. I see absolutely no advantage to moving from the current ICT format to this one. I don't... I don't follow how seeding errors a...

The Friar

I've become fascinated lately with the card system(s) used to pair teams at HSNCT during the prelim rounds. In sort of parallel to the discussion on the high school side about the PACE NSC format, I've been thinking about ways to use such a system at other tournaments. The event that most recommends...

The Friar

Is it true WUSTL only had one-sixth of one packet done the Tuesday (11/9) before the tournament, even though the deadline for two packets was Halloween, more than a week before that? I don't know. I was never supposed to be part of writing it at all. I got contacted even later than that and pressed...

The Friar

Congratulations to Northwestern, and thanks very much to all my fellow staff (and to Illinois' team for my second post-tournament jump start of the year). There was broad-based dissatisfaction with the question set. In addition to disagreement with a lot of the clue and answer choices, which will ha...

The Friar

As a result of WUStL's experience today at GIT, I recommend taking the time this evening or before the tournament in the morning to screen the packets for repeat questions. There were a few whole questions that got copied from the master document to more than one packet; for our purposes there were ...

The Friar

So, I'm retroactively awarding the Understatement of the Year Award 2009 to Seth for the following: I'm not sure that data is all that great to begin with (on a single-question level) Dirty data have proven a greater obstacle to question-level modeling of team strength than a thousand bad theoretica...

The Friar

Just realized the first proposed simplification would get rid of the need to constrain FRIAR 1.0 specificity parameters to have opposite sign. If there is only a division-wide tossup difficulty, then getting any tossup right ever means you can't be an infinitely bad team. With difficulty parameters ...

The Friar

Cernel Joson wrote:So...in layman's terms, what exactly is this program, anyway?

Matt, I'm so sorry. I missed what you asked. Charles got to it before I did. His answer is correct.

The Friar

any model that includes negs (observed or latent) needs to model them as a strength-independent decrease in the number of tossups a team has a "chance" of answering, not as an inherent indicator of team strength. So, in other words, it would be much more realistic to just treat negs as oc...

The Friar

[/quote]I might address some other things later, but this isn't a valid assumption. Teams neg independently of their ability to score points. As an extreme example, Maryland negged more than any other team in the nation at ICT and finished atop the second bracket, and all three of the top-negging te...

The Friar

Since I am getting ready to do another big slug of rating system coding, I thought it the appropriate time to ask whether a couple assumptions I would really like to use (but don't absolutely have to) in the design of FRIAR 2.0 meet the smell test in the community. I'm going to begin by using them, ...

The Friar

Sorry to take so long to follow up. Even this will be just a couple points. First, We start with a very basic assumption that a team with a higher rating ought to defeat a team with a lower rating a higher proportion of the time. We can model this canonically using a logistic model: P(Team 1 wins) =...

The Friar

I suggest that the problem with the binomial assumption in DP-FRIAR is more one of interpreting p too concretely (as encouraged by my original post) than in mis-specifying the data-generating process. Properly accounting for, say, what teams would have scored on bonuses that went dead would probably...

The Friar

I see a couple of inherent problems with this model: 1. The model assumes a range of 1300 points. As previously noted in, well, pretty much every critique of every NAQT tournament ever, the maximum number of points scored is a direct function of the ability of moderator speed and clarity (faster mo...

The Friar

In the past few days, in the course of programming and debugging FRIAR with negs and powers, I devised separately a team rating model simpler than FRIAR that nonetheless is theoretically sound in the same sense in which FRIAR is. I refer to this as DP-FRIAR, where DP stands for Divisional Packets. T...

The Friar

That's actually not a huge problem. If each building has at least 32 rooms and they keep 192 teams, then you can design a schedule so that teams only switch buildings during byes. You can even make even those building switches pretty rare. Worth noting that in addition to the Hyatt Regency this yea...

The Friar

I am bad at history, so I'd probably rather staff this than play, but I'm definitely in as a volunteer.

The Friar

now leaning back toward leaving Saturday night.

The Friar

So in. Will bring additional gear, possibly off-brand but should be 100% Wiffle compatible.

EDIT: assuming I'm not committed to driving anyone else home at the same time, but there really, really should be ways around that... ways that depart from or from immediately outside Union Station

The Friar

There was one tournament I heard about that placed all pronunciation guides needed for a question at the start of the question. Doing this even would most surely make a bigger improvement in reading quality than standardizing pronunciation guides would. I've started doing this even for tournaments ...

The Friar

I do not want sets to be left with errors in them. In my opinion there should be some very small correction to the D-value for teams that played the set with a chunk of questions that were harder to answer than what the final product was, and not that we should just make the mid-Atlantic SCT an eve...

The Friar

alexdz wrote:
The Friar wrote:Stats from the double round robin are available here.
Will the final game be added in and stats reposted accordingly?

Soon.

The Friar

As above noted, Missouri went 11-0 in regularly scheduled rounds to clear the field by more than 2 games and win the overall and undergraduate championships. The Geckos won a full-game tiebreaker for second place after finishing tied with MSU at 7-3 through the double round robin, and finished 8-4 o...

The Friar

crobbins52 wrote:
crobbins52 wrote:unless I can somehow find a way to St. Louis - perhaps a miracle of some sort.
Miracle?

My friend is graciously giving me her car to take. I'll be at this.

I should be able to get a buzzer system.

Sorry for all the confusion.

Hooray! See you tomorrow!

The Friar

crobbins52 wrote:So, great news... My teammate bailed on me today, and I again have no ride. Harding will have to drop out, unless I can somehow find a way to St. Louis - perhaps a miracle of some sort. Sorry.

Drat. I'm sorry you got abandoned. If you don't make it, have a good weekend regardless.

The Friar

We have always parked at that lot on the end of campus running up to Forest Park, and even though it's not free we have never once been noticed in the 4 Wash U tournaments I've driven to. Sean confirms that Charlie is correct about parking. The lots at Brookings Drive and Forest Park Parkway are a ...

The Friar

Ukonvasara wrote:
The Friar wrote:[...] a 6-team field [...] rebracketing into 3 playoff brackets for a single round robin within brackets.
So, another game, then?

Yes. This was the format used at ACF Winter at MSU.

The Friar

With a 6-team field, we are running a double round robin followed by rebracketing into 3 playoff brackets for a single round robin within brackets. A final (with advantage as appropriate) will then be played if needed. Registration will open at 8:00 am to enable a 9:00 am start time. (That start tim...

The Friar

The literature event will depend on how long we have rooms and staff available. I might be able to give you no better than a game-time decision on that -- I just haven't thought much about it yet. We're looking at a field size giving us 13 or 14 rounds of Regionals, though.

The Friar

Awesome. MSU is coming too. There's, like, a whole field here now.

The Friar

Are there any updates on the field, times, etc? See above for the current field list. Details of place and time will come out after practice on Wednesday night or when school administration responds yo John's request for rooms for the event. That said, expect a 9:00 start and a small number of roun...

The Friar

crobbins52 wrote:I'm still working on getting a team to this, but it's iffy.

Glad to hear it; keep us posted.

The Friar

As a side note, under an algorithm with an explicit adjustment for field strength, the effect on D-values of changing questions between sites may be larger than expected due to positive feedback: teams get credit not only for scoring more points, but for doing so against teams who themselves scored ...

The Friar

It's only psychological that the final tossup "decides the game." Every point in the game is equally as decisive, and the time at which those points are scored is largely irrelevant. I wish people would stop repeating this fallacious platitude. *NAQT has a clock, which means you are more ...

The Friar

Jeremy Gibbs-Marangoni Effect wrote:MSU might be sending some sort of team to this.

Great. We'd love to see you.

The Friar

Current field:

Mizzou
WKU
MSU
Truman
Harding
Surprize mystery team
House?

The Friar

There's nothing "irregular" about having a clock decide matches. [...] delimiting matches by time is exactly as arbitrary as having 20 questions or 22 questions or whatever. But that's just restating the premise of the debate: one notion says that matches should end after some time and yo...

The Friar

When I read, I tell teams to shut up all the time. And lo and behold, I usually get through a round pretty quickly, clock or no. I have had less success with doing this. You're a more important quizbowl personality than I am, and I think that makes a difference. I think not just everybody gets to t...

The Friar

Also, D-value type stats that use a version of points per tossup heard, adjusted only for opponent strength but not individual question difficulty, are biased if teams do not all hear exactly the same tossups. Systems using question-level data, such as FRIAR, would not be (asymptotically) biased in ...

The Friar

If my recollection is correct, this was a 24-team tournament that started sometime around 9:30 and finished up around 7:30; this was including a one-game final game played between us and Harvard. For comparison, this year's SCT at Harvard started at around 9:30 and was done around 6:30, with an adv...

The Friar

Are teams intending to come to this? Mizzou confirmed on Saturday that they're sending one team. Wash U can send at least one rookie house team not burdened with a packet requirement. Would we be clear to send more than one, including persons otherwise required to write, to fill out a field of four...

The Friar

"elimination policy" Hey, like, wow. Good digging. Thanks for finding that. As I said, I went looking for a document like that and couldn't find it. So, that's a surprising rule on NAQT's part, but not an ex ante bad one, so it definitely is what we signed up for and it was implemented as...

The Friar

My preference originally was to do an advantaged final; this was before both divisions were double round robin. Since this required 14 games (and we only get 16 packets), my concern (with some informed advice that I received) was that an advantaged final might result in an extreme situation where w...

The Friar

Truman State A did not finish two games clear of the Division II field, yet no advantage final was played in DII -- Truman A was declared the winner and all teams went home after Round 14. In :chip: 's word, why? Is there not an actual NAQT rule that would mandate a final be held? I can't find one o...

The Friar

Washington University in St. Louis is hosting an ACF Regionals site on February 27th, 2010. Note that this date is not an error: we are running one week later than the rest of ACF Regionals. I am serving as tournament director for this site. To register, please e-mail me at deep.friar@gmail.com with...

The Friar

Err...I think there may be an error in stats. I talked to my teammate Simon and he says he didn't get 13 tossups--which is eminently plausible, given that he's down as having gotten 12 of them against MSU. http://results.scobo.net/SQBS.aspx?org=MissouriState&id=2&page=playerdetail#p1_2 Edit...

The Friar

One team with a buzzer set and laptop is definitely coming from WUStL.

The Friar

MicroEStudent wrote:You're welcome everyone!

Thanks very much! (I got the invite a while ago but haven't been back to this thread to convey gratitude.)

The Friar

I'm toying with how to handle TUHs as the current system isn't as friendly as the rest of web application. [after stat finalization, you have to fill in how many tossups each player heard - while this is as easy as putting 8 20s for some, high school games are apt to have tons of substitutions] If,...

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