The Quizbowl Resource Center

ezubaric

Word seems to be the issue here, not Google docs. Why bother with it at all? (Google Docs works offline, now.)

In the past, version control software has worked well for me.

ezubaric

One problem with specifying line number is that different computers size the view differently, depending on the user's requirements. Not if the packets are pdf. Anyhow, the ideal solution would be to incorporate question delievery into scorekeeping. The question is on the screen. You click where th...

ezubaric

Princeton seems like it could do well with Kunle and Dan still participating; hopefully last year's scanty tournament attendance schedule for this team was a fluke. I am mostly to blame for that, as I was trying to graduate and my station wagon was the de facto transportation to most tournaments. I...

ezubaric

"hey, maybe we shouldn't have this question on All my Exes live in Texas?" I'm fairly certain we could come to this conclusion even without playtesting! Not to defend the question, which I seem to dimly recall being pretty transparent, but this is a song in the country genre that is prett...

ezubaric

For a while, there was a trend of putting the guides before the question began; I was a big fan of that. It allowed you to internalize the pronunciation before you randomly ran into something that couldn't be parsed.

ezubaric

Also, a couple of nitpicky science points: I'm 99% positive (and will check my sources this evening) that the stock-cutting problem is a subset of knapsack problems You're right, Jerry, it's much more related to knapsack problems (but such things are all relative given that they're all NP complete)...

ezubaric

I also like JSTOR:

http://www.jstor.org
(most unis have subscriptions)

And just doing google searches of the form "stuff site:edu", which often turns up course notes and whatnot.

ezubaric

thought it would help if we had some better guarantees about the editing as compared to the last PARFAIT. First off, there are more polite ways of asking this question (e.g., "who's going to be editing this tournament?"). Nevertheless, your concerns are legitimate. After the last PARFAIT'...

ezubaric

As to the first point--I meant that that the task could be distributed to moderators. Scanning would require another statroom but would at least allow for instant communication between the two, allowing you to keep stats. Taking the number of moderators and the skill set as a given, these options a...

ezubaric

Scan the sheets; type up the minimal amount of data (statlines for eight players, plus final score?) that you need and use email; use Taft. There are solutions. I don't understand; how would this remove the second stat room? Or host a tournament that's small enough that you can fit it in one buildi...

ezubaric

If you have to resort to multiple stat rooms, then you're doing something wrong. We couldn't fit all of our rooms in a single building. It's easier to have electrons running across buildings than having humans do the running. We've tried using runners in the past, but that has resulted in a big del...

ezubaric

The issue with individual stats is that there are so many teams that we don't have enough staff to have dedicated scorekeepers. So, moderators have to do all of the scoring. As many (most) of these moderators are inexperienced, a decision was made in the past to not require them to keep individual s...

ezubaric

leapfrog314 wrote:especially if I'm not the one doing the categorizing

Categorizing can be done quite easily automatically, especially with this much training data.

ezubaric

I've already talked to Jerry about adding a tagging system that would let trusted users mark questions as "history" "social science" "geography" etc, and then again by subcategory. Well, categories are question specific, while the annotations being discussed here are a...

ezubaric

Well, seeing that 74% of questions on Manifest Destiny mention Horace Greeley without having to read through all of them would be cool. Isn't that when you just query the results of the first and do some quick arithmetic, though? I mean, it would be cool, but if we don't start with something practi...

ezubaric

Not sure what the utility of such a search would be. You can already find every question on manifest destiny in the database, what would be the point of having proper names marked up specially? We could certainly throw that in at some further point if we're feeling adventurous, I guess. Well, seein...

ezubaric

Kevin Costello, Harris Nover, Irene Ying, and myself are tentatively planning a Caltech reunion team for this fine tournament.

-Jordan

ezubaric

Okay, I see. The benefit of those extra answer tags would be for an IRC bot (or something similar) using the CQML as its question source; with <accept>,<prompt> and <dna> tags, the bot can easily figure out what to do with a given answer, without having to do any sort of non-XML parsing. Another ni...

ezubaric

dschafer wrote:I've put an example CQML file on the wiki.

Thoughts?

How would "ANSWER: _J_ohn Fitzgerald _Kennedy_" be encoded?

ezubaric

Can you give an example of what you mean? I'm not sure I totally understand this. Okay, so suppose Jack has a packet with <Tossups>Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4</Tossups> <Bonuses>Q5 Q6</Bonuses> and Jill has a packet with <Tossups>Q_a Q_b</Tossups> <Bonuses>Q_c Q_d Q_e Q_f</Bonuses>. To combine them into a submissi...

ezubaric

edit: Quick rundown of QBML now available for those interested. Nice. Some more things that we had in Jerome (obviously more geared toward editing): 1. author for each question 2. editor for each question 3. status of each question (newly submitted, needs editing, finished) 4. category of each ques...

ezubaric

As someone who vaguely remembers submitting questions via Jerome, I think the hardest part was that you didn't know what parts of the distribution you had filled already. I don't remember all that much about the process, so this might be wrong, but (1) I don't think there was any code that said &qu...

ezubaric

have amongst us a Python person I am such a person. Google AppEngine also uses Python, but I've only tinkered around with it, but it would likely play well with Google Docs and be fairly spiffy, if past performance is any indication. Python is also nice because of this: http://nltk.sourceforge.net/...

ezubaric

Awww, man. I was moving this weekend and missed a chance to get on my favorite soapbox. I apologize if I'm wrong about the Google docs thing, but it seems to me that markup language would be hard to preserve? Actually, Google docs preserves LaTeX fairly well. We used it for PARFAIT, and just placed ...

ezubaric

I do understand that people like Jordan, Evan, and myself are in the minority when it comes to this issue. Therefore, I'll just reiterate my plea to format your packets properly as per the ACF guidelines. This makes it easier on all of us. True, true. I'm just hoping that if I hop on the soapbox ev...

ezubaric

Or, if you're really cool, convert all your Word Docs to plain text using antiword , then grep them (or ack them or rak them). Well, we could move away from proprietary, closed formats and have machine readable formatting that would allow for easy, instantaneous shuffling, searching, categorization...

ezubaric

The hardcore but inefficient way would be through including the JPG in a LaTeX document. This is what I'd do too. I'd write a python script using the glob tool, read the directory with all of the images, place each image in a latex file (with each image set as width=100%), and the render the pdf fi...

ezubaric

the first goal is to get as many questions as possible, after which I'll work to translate the categorizer to PHP and implement it. Another possibility, rather than incorporating it into php, is just to have a Python or Java daemon that runs nightly and classifies all questions that currently don't...

ezubaric

I have code that will automatically assign top-level tags to questions (and finer tags to science questions). I sent the code to Jerry some time ago (but Java doesn't play well with a purely php environment, and I don't know php, so it might not make its way into the program), but I'd also be willin...

ezubaric

What about vowels that couldn't be reasonably be confused with each other? For instance, there was once a tossup on the Taika reform, and because it was only foggily in my mind and perhaps because I was confusing it with Haiku, I said "Taiku" and was ruled incorrect (this was at ICT and by...

ezubaric

Banana paper wrote:Evan is right, I will be working at Microsoft starting in August.

Well, you could always form a Microsoft team with Dan Benediktson.

ezubaric

DumbJaques wrote:Uhm, I'm probably overlooking something hilariously obvious, but didn't MIT's Division II team go 2-10? Is there something I'm missing here? How in the world are they listed ahead of those other teams?

I also don't see why Brown, who finished better than MIT isn't on the D2 list at all.

ezubaric

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:Obviously we'd like to see many more teams sign up for this tournament. Please let me know if you're interested (or if you already registered and I forgot to put you on this list).

Princeton will almost certainly come.

ezubaric

username: ezubaric

ezubaric

For comparison purposes, that gives mythology the same quiz bowl prominence as physics, world current events, and the visual fine arts. To me, personally, that seems awfully high. It does to me too. I also felt that Greek myth probably appeared more than it should, but the overall proportion of myt...

ezubaric

For any set of weak-classifiers, this process is guaranteed to converge to a solution that classifies at least as well as the best classifier. Developed by Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire, this meta-algorithm involves repeatedly reclassifying the training data with the best of the set of original c...

ezubaric

Ray Luo was visibly upset after negging about halfway through the question with "bootstrapping", which was apparently a reasonable guess since the question contained something like "FTP name this type of bootstrapping", and after the answer was read he protested that it should h...

ezubaric

Princeton will send something, most likely a D1 team and a D2 team. Perhaps two D1 teams if we can convince our grad students to come out.

ezubaric

Are there packet exemptions for inexperienced teams?

ezubaric

I guess I don't see the reason to have more than 1/1 per tournament. I'd much rather see those spots go to architecture or introducing some new artists or composers to the canon, if not to traditional fine arts material. This again might be a personal preference but I think it's safe to say this to...

ezubaric

NO POLITICS IN THE AHAN JR POOL OK quoted for some super truth Is this a personal preference or a directive from an admin? If the second, I can't find anything about that in the rules section, and it seems odd to not allow ridicule for one's political beliefs while allowing the same for for religio...

ezubaric

grapesmoker wrote:Rostron's personal issues aside, Romney really does suck.

I used to like Romney before he went all crazy conservative to woo hardliners. Speaking of crazy Mormons:

http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=68210&v=3393428911

ezubaric

had deep involvement with LDS and as a consequence of their beliefs, denied Brian various medical attention Unless he had an Rx for double malt whiskey, LDS folk are pretty keen on prompt, thorough, modern medical treatment. That story also sounds a little dubious (but this, of course, is speculati...

ezubaric

Why would you do this? That's not editing, that's just glancing! I was saying that, I left the original answers when I felt they would be okay and when original clues were maintained, I left them in their original order. Why are you starting out with a bible-heavy distribution anyway, when you know...

ezubaric

Packets are now available here: http://www.princeton.edu/~cbowl/parfait2007/packets.zip They'll also be going up on the archive soon, hopefully. Obviously, it's fine to talk about the questions specifically now. Many people have detailed comments they want to share, and now is the time. Some people ...

ezubaric

Shadowstrike wrote:Still trying to secure space, but tentatively the date should be Feb. 23. Will make a full announcement when we finally secure the space.

Any details?

ezubaric

The feeling I got was that Princeton was just riding the reputation of Chris Frankel's good work from 2005, and had expended minimal effort to really put together a good tournament. You must mean 2004. Frankel contributed some much appreciated questions to the 2005 PARFAIT set, but didn't edit 2005...

ezubaric

Does anyone have an electronic copy of these yet? If so, please send to Eric [underscore] Mukherjee [at] brown [dot] edu. Only the hosts have electronic copies of the packets, and because it's just too easy for electronic copies to float around and compromise security, we're not sending them out un...

ezubaric

And extra thanks to head editor Jordan Boyd-Graber. I apologize for the perceived problems in the packets; there were some real problems there, particularly packet six, which had to particularly vague questions and a wonky distribution. There were also some typos through the packets, but hopefully ...

ezubaric

gd wrote:I imagine some teams are likely to drop, and so there's a good chance you can in fact come.

This has happened. If you can bring another team, please do.

Cheers,

Jordan

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