2020 IKEA - General Set Discussion

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2020 IKEA - General Set Discussion

Post by Bhagwan Shammbhagwan »

This is for general set discussion. A longer post is forthcoming.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Hi all! I head-edited this tournament. Subject editors were as follows:
  • Hari: History, Visual Arts, Geography
  • Gerhardt: Beliefs
  • Billy: Science
  • Will: Literature, Phil/SS, Auditory Arts, Modern World/Misc Ac.
In order from most questions written to least, the writers were: Will Alston, Hari Parameswaran, Gerhardt Hinkle, Tejas Santanam, Noah Sheidlower, Billy Busse, Daniel Shao, Noah Chen, Rodrigo Rose, Quentin Mot, Sumedh Garmiella, Sohum Shenoy, Caroline Mao

Our original goal was to produce a fairly moderate "regular difficulty" set. I think in practice we over-shot this, in part due to bringing in a lot of topics that hadn't come up much before / rather original answers, and in part due to just making things objectively too hard; no doubt, additional difficulties were induced by lag causing buzzes to be delayed and teams to mis-communicate, thus missing bonus parts. So, the set probably played out even harder since stuff was online. Which sucks, because we wanted an easier event than a lot of more recent regular sets.

For a lot of our questions, studying old packets probably wasn't of much use. I don't have too much of an opinion on whether this was good or not - I wish the set played out easier, but I didn't want to throw away the creative and semi-wacky feel of the tournament, nor deny our writers the opportunity to ask a bunch of exciting new topics which we (perhaps mistakenly) thought people would have a lot of knowledge of. I do, however, think it made the set unique and hopefully interesting to listen to, if perhaps not as rewarding of traditional preparation.

I'd like to thank all the writers for producing good material and being excellent collaborators. Bringing up our production schedule several months to fill a fall tournament slot wasn't an easy task, but we managed to pull it off and produce what I thought was a high quality tournament.

Discuss away!
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by Hot Soup »

I am not good enough to comment on the set as a whole, but I will say that I was overall a big fan of how the increased Math/CS/Applied Science/Data Science distro was handled. The TUs on Webscraping and Solving Differential Equations as well as the bonuses on supervised ML methods and the Pandas library were interesting and fairly accessible even for non-experts who are interested in the field.

Besides that, I really enjoyed the TU on the music from the Godfather and the bonus on SCD + CF; I thought both were really creative approaches to ask about well-troden topics.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by VSCOelasticity »

Really enjoyed the science in this set. Most of the early clues and hard parts that our team knew always seemed well chosen, and the majority of the ones that we did not know seemed interesting and important. Hard parts that come to mind as I'm posting are elliptic integrals, ensemble classifiers, self-energy of the electron, liquid junction potential, gallium nitride, QMMM, and omega cross (omega cross R) (biased by my science leanings, not meant as a knock on hard parts in other subdistros).

The decision to have more applied/engineering in the science distribution introduced more variability, of course, but they were fun to play!

Thanks to Billy and all the science writers for producing such quality science! The set as a whole was enjoyed by our team, so thank you to the rest of the editing/writing team as well :)
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by TaylorH »

I want to congratulate the writers and editors on what I think was one of the best tournaments in recent memory. The difficulty was spot on, the context clues in the TUs appeared in just the right spots, and there was of course a ton of interesting content that I am excited to learn about when I read back over the packets. A few broad thoughts:

-Of the 4 or 5 film question we heard, three of them seemed to focus on purely the auditory/soundtrack aspects of film (The Godfather, Blade Runner, and a bonus mentioning a film composer). I appreciate covering film in this angle, but having it be the conceit of the majority of the film question we heard felt like a bit much. I did like all the film questions in a vacuum though!

-The literature bonuses felt variable in the difficulty of hard/medium parts, more so than other categories. Some felt like they were along the lines of ACF Regionals bonuses, while other wouldn't be out of place at EFT. I liked a lot of the contemporary lit bonuses quite a bit, but some felt like they played hard in general compared to the more canon bonuses.

-The set felt a bit light on poetry, but I could be wrong.

Really a suburb set. I hope the writers/editors continue to work on sets this good in the future
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

-The literature bonuses felt variable in the difficulty of hard/medium parts, more so than other categories. Some felt like they were along the lines of ACF Regionals bonuses, while other wouldn't be out of place at EFT. I liked a lot of the contemporary lit bonuses quite a bit, but some felt like they played hard in general compared to the more canon bonuses.

-The set felt a bit light on poetry, but I could be wrong.
Sorry if this felt uneven - this was my first time taking a crack at editing a full literature set. I took a lot of advice from Jordan Brownstein on smoothing out the difficulty and ended up replacing a bunch of tougher hard parts down the line. A lot of first drafts ended up playing out harder than intended as well - Inklings, for example, was the original middle part of the fantasy literature bonus, but that was playing a bit tough to I retooled it to ask for Merlin as the middle (he originally was the easy with a more full description). So, this may have resulted in a few things being toned down a decent bit below the others that weren't.

Contemporary lit is always tricky - in general, I went with what I thought would be the easiest reasonable way to ask each of the contemporary topics I was going for, i.e. giving you all of Helen Oyeyemi's best-known titles, asking "Oman" instead of having you name Jokha al-Harthi (while working in Naomi Shihab-Nye as well), and asking for "New York" with a link into Kenzaburo Oe in the bonus on Minae Mizumura's A True Novel. I was pleased to see all of these get converted by multiple teams, though they probably come in a bit "harsher" than other topics.

As for poetry, the distribution specified 1/1 per packet, which is less than what most tournaments end up with. I love poetry (it's probably my best area of literature) but I think this is the right amount to make sure that there's room for lots of meaty questions about important novels, a decent amount of nonfiction, and an appropriate number of drama and short fiction questions. The split ended up being 18/18 Long Fiction, 14/14 Poetry, 10/10 Drama, 7/7 Short Fiction, and 7/7 Nonfiction/Miscellaneous, combining for 56/56 total literature across the set.

I'll let Hari speak to the film, though I'll note that I was concerned about this as well when the Blade Runner question was written to have mostly auditory clues after we already had the Godfather soundtrack tossup. We could probably stand to replace a couple of the clues in the former. We did, though, have 5/5 film across the set and I think a decent amount of these had non-auditory topics in them. Maybe we could just shift the Finals 2 question into an earlier packet instead of Blade Runner to make sure people hear a decent spread of content, as that one's a bit more purely visual focused.

Finally:
Really a suburb set.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by ryanrosenberg »

Hot Soup wrote: Fri Oct 09, 2020 12:50 pm I am not good enough to comment on the set as a whole, but I will say that I was overall a big fan of how the increased Math/CS/Applied Science/Data Science distro was handled. The TUs on Webscraping and Solving Differential Equations as well as the bonuses on supervised ML methods and the Pandas library were interesting and fairly accessible even for non-experts who are interested in the field.
I agree with this, and would like to see future tournaments continue to include increased space for engineering and data science.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by king_crimson »

This set was fun.

The lit in this set was generally quite good. It had a good combination of high canon + deep cuts from the core canon. I especially liked the drama and poetry content: most of it was really interesting and clued stuff I didn't think would be clued up. Bonuses tended to be slightly difficult, with the medium parts sometimes being as difficult as an easier hard part, but I don't think I have enough experience with college level sets especially to comment on that.

My teammate thought this set had some of the best science tossups he had ever played. He especially seemed to like the applied computer science in which it was a twist on the standard "this data structure" tossup.

History seemed slightly difficult. The content seemed interesting, but may have been too hard at some instances. Not sure if I can comment much more about that however.

The belief practice thing for RM was interesting, but our team didn't really like it in general. It was a cool idea however.

This set's other academic was fun. Will is good at making fun other ac. I liked the bonus on medieval bestiaries.

Thanks for writing the set!
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I liked the bonus on medieval bestiaries.
That was in the "Texts, Scriptures, and Stories" distribution which your team seemed to not like :razz:

I shouldn't take the credit for all the other academic, as most of that content came from a bunch of other writers. I did take my usual hard line with CE/MW questions, staying in particular away from hot topics and nonsense scandals and attempting to focus on topics with a bit more of a "long term" views of things, or rewarding people for being deep on particular industries and international politics writ large. But Hari, Noah, Tejas, and others should be credited with questions such as the ones on facial recognition software, table tennis, West African food, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others and providing some great material for this "wheel of fortune" category of random topics of general knowledge interest which are intriguing to hear questions about.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by whatamidoinghere »

I loved the history in this set, and I'm pretty sure my teammates from the open no bounceback mirror would agree that they enjoyed the history questions too. Some of the hard parts seemed to veer into stuff that's really hard to get even with pretty good knowledge of the bonus's topic (such as that hard part on "Deep Battle" in the Subutai bonus or Trowulan—though that may have changed between my team's mirror and now), but hey that's more things to learn after the fact.

The literature was also pretty fun. I also enjoyed the balance between core and some of the more "out there" questions. The physics question stood out to me but that's more because it was on stuff I liked than anything about difficulty/quality of clues.

I enjoyed this set a lot. Thanks for making this happen, Columbia and Georgia Tech!
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Yeah, Trowulan was me reasoning from "Palembang was a hard part before, so we can probably do Trowulan." But nobody converted it in the first few mirrors, so I changed to Singhasari for later mirrors.

I'll happily point to Hari's great bonus part on deep battle and my bonus part on interior lines as stuff that you'd actually study as important strategic principles when learning about military history - I encountered both concepts from my casual readings on the subject many years ago. I was very happy we could have a couple of these questions in the set and was pleased to see people who study military history, like Ryan Bilger, convert interior lines.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by Bhagwan Shammbhagwan »

TaylorH wrote: Thu Oct 29, 2020 1:31 pm -Of the 4 or 5 film question we heard, three of them seemed to focus on purely the auditory/soundtrack aspects of film (The Godfather, Blade Runner, and a bonus mentioning a film composer). I appreciate covering film in this angle, but having it be the conceit of the majority of the film question we heard felt like a bit much. I did like all the film questions in a vacuum though!
That's certainly a fair point. I've been meaning to write a Blade Runner question themed around the soundtrack for some time, but since we already had The Godfather question, I tried to tie it as much to the plot as possible (barring the first clue, which is completely related to the soundtrack). Unfortunately, I don't think that's how it turned out. As Will mentioned, it might be best just to push one of these tossups to a later packet and switch it with the film question in the Finals packets.

I felt justified in asking Jerry Goldsmith because he seems like a fairly important Hollywood composer and one that should probably come up more often (the Chinatown score is pretty great).
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

Jerry Goldsmith is indeed awesome.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by henrygoff »

I found the lit in this set to be incredibly well-executed, especially with regard to more core canon works. Will already pointed out that he went for a certain "theme" when selecting clues for the Middlemarch tossup, and similarly, I really liked how the tossups on War & Peace and Unbearable Lightness of Being also focused on the historical and philosophical themes of each novel, while still finding ways to work in more well-known clues near the end that fit each theme.

The VFA was also quite enjoyable to play, and really delivered on the "Excellent Answerlines" that the set name advertised. The clue selection was always cool and evocative, and answerlines like "Hitler," "skin," and "surgeries" (despite my quibble with the answerline construction) made for very entertaining questions.

Overall, this tournament felt like it rewarded knowledge that I earned through genuine interest on each subject, moreso than studying typical quizbowl topics--one of my teammates was especially enthusiastic that his real knowledge on Thorne-Zytkow objects came up in the neutron stars question. Thank you to Georgia Tech and Columbia for putting together such a great set!
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by cwasims »

Thanks to Columbia and GT for writing a great tournament! I agree with the earlier posters that the set had a lot of interesting and fresh answer lines, and I particularly enjoyed some of the social science, especially on Ibn Khaldun, as well as being able to buzz early on the utility functions tossup so as to not be excessively reminded of my micro theory midterm. I think the extra geography questions were very welcome and a good change from the anti-geography stance that has dominated non-NAQT Quiz Bowl for the last many years.

The one category I had substantive issues with was the music, which seems not have been mentioned much so far. I think this was a combination of two poorly conceived/executed tossups in the nine packets we played as well as what I think was a fairly sub-par distribution among the remainder. The two tossups that I did not enjoy were: "violin concertos", which after mentioning several not-particularly-famous 20th century concertos name-drops Anne-Sophie Mutter, an extremely famous violinist, in power, leading to a three-way buzzer race (which my teammate won), and "Russian Orthodoxy" which, while original, was just incredibly transparent from the start.

There were also several distributional issues - for one, three out of the ten tossups that seemed to be auditory arts were either opera tossups or clued mostly from opera in the early part of the question (Götterdämmerung, Vivaldi, Borodin), which seems somewhat excessive to me. Together with a world music tossup and a ballet tossup, this left relatively few questions on "classical music" as QB has historically defined the category, which is potentially alright except that two of those questions were fairly poor, in my opinion. In particular, there were basically no clues from symphonies whatsoever, which I think is pretty unideal given that the symphony is perhaps the defining genre of Western classical music. Somewhat aside from these considerations, I will also note that Haydn cluing from string quartets and Rodeo have been fairly overdone topics in QB and seemed a bit out of place among the more original and interesting content in the other music questions, such as in "chromatic" and "harp".

I suspect a response to these concerns may be that some of the topics I mentioned in fact appeared in later packets. I personally think this is a poor response - although obviously it is not possible in nine (or eight, or ten) packets to include all the subcategories you might like, as an editor you have to think about whether each of these combinations of packets will lead to a category that is well-balanced, especially in the age of relatively shorter online tournaments. For ACF Winter I very explicitly took this into consideration in the pack order, although in that case it was impossible to account for teams not hearing a particular subdistribution because of their bye.

All that being said, I'd like to re-iterate that I enjoyed this tournament quite a bit. The data science questions even made me a feel like a science player a few times during the day!
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

The comment about the lack of symphony content in tossups is well-taken. I generally classify music as "orchestral, chamber, solo piano, opera" etc. when distributing a tournament, but this approach led me to not clue enough from symphonies in this tournament. I think we could have used some more of those - despite liking the Russian Orthodox question, that's probably the one best-suited to be replaced, since I'm fairly comfortable with the distribution of the other questions.
There were also several distributional issues - for one, three out of the ten tossups that seemed to be auditory arts were either opera tossups or clued mostly from opera in the early part of the question (Götterdämmerung, Vivaldi, Borodin), which seems somewhat excessive to me. Together with a world music tossup and a ballet tossup, this left relatively few questions on "classical music" as QB has historically defined the category, which is potentially alright except that two of those questions were fairly poor, in my opinion. In particular, there were basically no clues from symphonies whatsoever, which I think is pretty unideal given that the symphony is perhaps the defining genre of Western classical music.
Honestly, this just comes across as sour grapes that the questions didn't have enough stuff you like. I will admit to having messed up the symphonies thing, but I don't see what's wrong with having three questions that clue a lot from opera out of 14 music tossups, nor why opera questions which draw heavily on a mix of score clues, plot clues, performance clues, and music history clues can't count as classical music. Opera is a firm part of the Western classical music tradition and many opera selections are performed as excerpts, i.e. the Polovtsian Dances. Two of these questions also had substantial non-opera clues in the later part of the question, which I suppose you don't get to hear because you're buzzing early, but that matters for many teams. The Rodeo tossup was in Other Arts, not classical music - though the clues rewarded classical music knowledge as well. I guess I probably could have come up with a more inventive world music question, but the drums submission was workable.
"violin concertos", which after mentioning several not-particularly-famous 20th century concertos name-drops Anne-Sophie Mutter, an extremely famous violinist, in power
My thought was to reward people who pay attention to classical music performers and contemporary music and not have the question be too hard; perhaps this was a bit too generous. I don't think Previn and Esa-Pekka Salonen's VCs are, like, out-of-this-world obscure, particularly the latter, but can see why this would be a bit of a cliff for people who are generally "aware of the music world."

As for Russian Orthodoxy, I'd appreciate some more context.
Somewhat aside from these considerations, I will also note that Haydn cluing from string quartets...have been fairly overdone topics in QB and seemed a bit out of place among the more original and interesting content in the other music questions, such as in "chromatic" and "harp".
I must express my sincere apologies that the question on the "Father of the String Quartet" had clues about his string quartets - in addition to the clues about Haydn's pieces for mechanical clock, the Seven Last Words of Christ, and the "Surprise" symphony.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by cwasims »

naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 4:36 pm The comment about the lack of symphony content in tossups is well-taken. I generally classify music as "orchestral, chamber, solo piano, opera" etc. when distributing a tournament, but this approach led me to not clue enough from symphonies in this tournament. I think we could have used some more of those - despite liking the Russian Orthodox question, that's probably the one best-suited to be replaced, since I'm fairly comfortable with the distribution of the other questions.
There were also several distributional issues - for one, three out of the ten tossups that seemed to be auditory arts were either opera tossups or clued mostly from opera in the early part of the question (Götterdämmerung, Vivaldi, Borodin), which seems somewhat excessive to me. Together with a world music tossup and a ballet tossup, this left relatively few questions on "classical music" as QB has historically defined the category, which is potentially alright except that two of those questions were fairly poor, in my opinion. In particular, there were basically no clues from symphonies whatsoever, which I think is pretty unideal given that the symphony is perhaps the defining genre of Western classical music.
Honestly, this just comes across as sour grapes that the questions didn't have enough stuff you like. I will admit to having messed up the symphonies thing, but I don't see what's wrong with having three questions that clue a lot from opera out of 14 music tossups, nor why opera questions which draw heavily on a mix of score clues, plot clues, performance clues, and music history clues can't count as classical music. Opera is a firm part of the Western classical music tradition and many opera selections are performed as excerpts, i.e. the Polovtsian Dances. Two of these questions also had substantial non-opera clues in the later part of the question, which I suppose you don't get to hear because you're buzzing early, but that matters for many teams. The Rodeo tossup was in Other Arts, not classical music - though the clues rewarded classical music knowledge as well. I guess I probably could have come up with a more inventive world music question, but the drums submission was workable.
I'm sorry that parts of this post came across as sour grapes - I (or my team) actually got most of the questions that I have mentioned not liking as much and not getting the questions that I thought were quite good. In keeping with what I said at the end of my post, I would definitely not say that 3/14 is excessive, however 3/9 (and 3/8 out of the Western classical) strikes me as one too many, meaning I would probably have moved one of those questions to a later round to make sure that the subdistributions were more evenly spaced out. This is a small difference, but I do think that these small differences matter, especially when dealing with small categories that have a lot of ground to cover. I also don't think it's really sufficient to say that there existed some non-opera clues later in the question: if the question was answered correctly before those clues were read, they functionally do not exist for the teams playing that tossup. (This is, incidentally, why I think themed tossups are very important: they ensure that the tossup covers a particular subdistribution at all levels of knowledge.)
naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 4:36 pm
"violin concertos", which after mentioning several not-particularly-famous 20th century concertos name-drops Anne-Sophie Mutter, an extremely famous violinist, in power
My thought was to reward people who pay attention to classical music performers and contemporary music and not have the question be too hard; perhaps this was a bit too generous. I don't think Previn and Esa-Pekka Salonen's VCs are, like, out-of-this-world obscure, particularly the latter, but can see why this would be a bit of a cliff for people who are generally "aware of the music world."

As for Russian Orthodoxy, I'd appreciate some more context.
To be clear, think the Salonen and Previn concertos are fine lead-in and second lines at this level, but the enormous cliff in power is very suboptimal in my opinion. I think here it's important to bear in mind that one does not necessarily need to be very "aware of the music world" to get this - given that soloist names tend to be prominently displayed on recordings (probably even more so than conductors), someone who's listened to violin concertos is highly likely to have heard of Mutter before.

Regarding the Russian Orthodoxy question, it just seemed very obvious to me what the conceit was from the start given it was pretty obviously a Christian denomination and Russian Orthodoxy has many tie-ins to Classical music. I suppose I might've been helped by my very high level of real knowledge about Anglican church music and so being able to rule out some other answers, but I don't think that was really all that significant in my thought process. I do know at least one other music player I talked to felt the same way about the question. Although I'm sure it would require substantial modification, I do think some of the clues could form the basis for a cool religious practice tossup.
naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 4:36 pm
Somewhat aside from these considerations, I will also note that Haydn cluing from string quartets...have been fairly overdone topics in QB and seemed a bit out of place among the more original and interesting content in the other music questions, such as in "chromatic" and "harp".
I must express my sincere apologies that the question on the "Father of the String Quartet" had clues about his string quartets - in addition to the clues about Haydn's pieces for mechanical clock, the Seven Last Words of Christ, and the "Surprise" symphony.
I'm sorry that my previous post sounded fairly accusatory on this point - at the end of the day, the Rodeo and Haydn tossups were well-written, even if they had somewhat of a "ticking off a box" feel relative to the originality of some of the other questions. I will stand by my claim that the Haydn quartets are over-asked about though: undoubtedly important as they are to string quartet players and the historical development of the genre, I have a suspicion that their memorable nicknames plays a pretty large role in the relative abundance of QB questions about them at the expense (at least from my perspective) of questions on other types of chamber music, especially those not for string quartet.

EDIT: As per Will's post below, this doesn't mean that Haydn string quartets or Rodeo should never come up, but just that in my opinion it's a topic that has been asked about a lot over the last many years and for reasons that I don't think are wholly reflective of its musical importance. Given that we don't really have public discussion about "things that should come up more" or "things that should come up less" (and, I think, for good reason), there's not really a place to express these opinions beyond these sorts of forum posts which are unfortunately attached to a particular tournament despite making a more broadly applicable claim.
Last edited by cwasims on Sun Dec 06, 2020 8:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Yeah, I'll just say that to me the Borodin tossup only half feels like an opera question, given that a bunch of it clues from the Polovtsian dances (often performed as an orchestral excerpt) and In the Steppes of Central Asia. One of these could have gone in packet 11 or 12 - but since the number of packets played per mirror is inconsistent (some will have 9, some will have 11, some will have more due to finals) the overall feel is really hard to capture. Ultimately I think the set would have best been balanced by putting in a Romantic symphonies question at the expense of the Russian Orthodox tossup and maybe having one more "Surprise" symphony clue in the Haydn question.

I really don't mean to be excessively dismissive, because I appreciate the subdistributional critique and think this is a good thing for other music editors to pay attention to. But having someone just come in and go "man, I wish this regular-difficulty set [which already ended up a bit too hard] had more creative questions than it already did" and lamenting "standard" stuff just sometimes makes me want to punch a wall. There was a good post in last year's Penn Bowl discussion by Aaron Rosenberg where he expressed his irritation at people lamenting "standard" questions on common topics:
In the meantime, let me address a pet peeve. QB veterans: please cut down on using "standard" as a pejorative, particularly for regular-difficulty sets with lots of new writers. I like creative questions as much as the next guy but they don't grow on trees and they're particularly hard to write in science while still maintaining accessibility. At national tournaments, yes, you need fresh ideas 1.) to distinguish between top teams, and 2.) because it's nats. There were many such standard tossups in the ACF nationals submissions this year which I threw out without a second thought. At regular difficulty, I think it would behoove the community to temper expectations. I did have a fun time writing that tossup on the metric tensor, but it only got converted in 40% of rooms at the Penn site (and Dirac delta in 60%). Any more tossups like that and the category would just make half the field miserable.
At the risk of telling you how to post Chris - when someone says like "oh man, this Haydn question is really standard and stock" when in fact...

a) I'm as well aware of this as you are, having gotten several such questions before based on superficial knowledge of Haydn quartets (i.e. witches minuet, cute nicknames, etc.)
b) On account of this, I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a good (and I think fresh) lead-in about "The Lark", add a fun clue about mechanical clock pieces, The Seven Last Words of Christ, etc.

...it just makes me go "man, why do I bother."

Look, I wrote over 160 fucking questions for this tournament and edited several categories in addition to music. That's probably not the best guarantee of quality, but it seems to have come out pretty good. Beyond this, I've edited classical music for two EFTs, two regular-difficulty sets, WAO, and an ACF Fall. Considering all of this, not all of the ideas I produce are going to be quite as innovative and I recognize that - I wanted a pretty standard, competent question on a famous composer to balance out a lot of my more experimental questions, in addition to Noah's very solid submissions (if you want a great classical music writer for your set, Noah Sheidlower is the absolute man).

If you weren't as big a fan of it, sure. But I don't want other music writers coming in and reading this thread and going "yeah, time to avoid writing tossups on Haydn string quartets" or other well-known bodies of work by innovators in a particular genre (imagine if someone made this conclusion about Chopin preludes or whatnot, it'd be absolutely mental). I particularly don't want such new writers to say "oh man, I guess I can't just do this BORING idea, guess I gotta make all these things CREATIVE" when you're probably more likely to fail than succeed as a new writer trying something creative. Heck, I wasn't that happy with the Russian Orthodox and chromatic questions ultimately either. You can re-tread existing ground while using new clues, this is a standard and good practice and probably something well worth doing if you're just starting out. I guess maybe people ought to expect more of me, but that's my piece.

I will end this by asking you to be well-prepared for CO, because the bag of tricks is going to be busted out there for sure.

EDIT: I want to acknowledge that this post is very hostile and comes across as angry. Chris is an excellent music player and his questions for ACF Winter were superb. I don't think he's denigrating the work on this set either. What I really want people to learn from this is that there is no reason you should avoid writing a standard question on a well-trodden topic unless you're just literally regurgitating old leadins word-for-word, which we all know is bad.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by warum »

I agree that Anna-Sophie Mutter has the potential to be a cliff for "violin concerto" in a game with multiple music specialists. I don't recall whether it played that way in the game I was in.

I really enjoyed buzzing on the Seven Last Words clue in the Haydn tossup. It was a great use of a piece whose form is unusual enough to serve as a clue; the bonus on Beethoven's C-sharp minor quartet also had that trait if I remember correctly.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by tpmorrison »

I really enjoyed this set! Echoing some previous posts, I was a big fan of the expanded Math/CS/Stats/etc. distribution and would love to see more sets go in that direction. I’m sure I’m forgetting some stuff, but the questions on ensemble classifiers, the Dartmouth workshop, web scraping, numerically solving PDEs, and maps (which apparently was SS, but still had this flavor) all seemed like well-executed approaches to important topics that haven’t been asked about as much. I also thought the pure math was very good.

This is a very minor quibble, but I wasn’t a fan of the hard part on the “triangular distribution.” I’ve never heard of this, and a Google search suggests it’s not particularly noteworthy (though it’s quite possible I’m wrong).

Thanks again to everyone involved for a very fun set!
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by touchpack »

tpmorrison wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 11:10 pm I really enjoyed this set! Echoing some previous posts, I was a big fan of the expanded Math/CS/Stats/etc. distribution and would love to see more sets go in that direction. I’m sure I’m forgetting some stuff, but the questions on ensemble classifiers, the Dartmouth workshop, web scraping, numerically solving PDEs, and maps (which apparently was SS, but still had this flavor) all seemed like well-executed approaches to important topics that haven’t been asked about as much. I also thought the pure math was very good.

This is a very minor quibble, but I wasn’t a fan of the hard part on the “triangular distribution.” I’ve never heard of this, and a Google search suggests it’s not particularly noteworthy (though it’s quite possible I’m wrong).

Thanks again to everyone involved for a very fun set!
I'm glad you enjoyed the quantitative content in the set!

I didn't write the triangular distribution bonus part and was initially skeptical, but upon some searching I found that it seems to be used a reasonable amount in finance/business applications, so I okay'd it as fitting in with the set's heavy focus on applications to diverse fields. It's not entirely "science" in that sense, and is possibly still too hard for a bonus part at this level, but that was the thinking behind it.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by Krasznahorkai did nothing wrong »

This was a pretty fun set! Here's a few things I think it did really well:

- It's hard to write a regs set that has a ton of original content while still being near regs difficulty, but this set did it! In general there were very few clues that I'd call "stock" and that was really, really nice

- There were a ton of questions that were hard in terms of the clues they used but still had very fair and convertible answer lines. This meant that buzzing around the power mark felt really good and I didn't feel stupid when questions in my categories went to the very end.

- This set took a lot of bold, conscious risks in the sort of quirky slant it went for. I think for the most part they payed off, IKEA definitely felt distinct from the large number of quasi-regs difficulty sets that have been housewritten over the years. I'll shout out a few questions I really liked in the specific question thread.

Here's some things that felt rough:

- I really appreciate that Walston pointed this out in his OP, but this set bordered on too hard. This was especially evident in the bonuses which I think were almost universally too harsh across all subjects (Walston's also right that online qb definitely exacerbated this). Maybe I'm a scrub, but a lot of the time the middle and hard parts didn't feel distinct from each other in that they were both too difficult in ways that weren't that interesting. I think there could have been more of an effort to at least tone down some of the middle parts to make them more accessible and I don't think this would've sacrificed this set's originality.

- As someone on a team without a dedicated science player the science in this set was difficult to 10. We bageled a science bonus every round and there were a few where we bageled two. I'm fine with having terrible sci ppb, after all my team and I are very bad at sci, but for reference we avoided a science bagel most rounds at each of the past two acf regs. It feels really shitty not being able to 10 a bonus at regs difficulty and I feel like a lot of the sci in this set was written to be easy for someone who knew sci rather than actually easy. I'm aware that as a scrub, my perspective on sci isn't very important and if someone were to respond to this with "well you're just bad at sci" I don't have any defense.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie that we went very hard on the "no find your ass easy parts" philosophy for this set. Billy was very much on board with this for the science - so it was definitely very possible to get a zero there.

This was intentional - I hate pity 10s. This game is hard, so when you're breaking with that overall feeling and handing out points for no effort, to me it feels like it defeats the purpose in many ways. I don't doubt that this drove down a lot of conversion numbers, but hope that it felt rewarding at the same time to really earn your points.

As for middle parts, I really tried my best to make them pretty moderate across the set and we actively sought out a bunch of the roughest ones during playtesting. A few did probably end up a bit much after editing - though if I had to guess, I think it was probably the tougher easies and more out of the box hards that were most driving down conversion overall.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Tue Dec 08, 2020 10:47 pm Yeah, I'm not gonna lie that we went very hard on the "no find your ass easy parts" philosophy for this set. Billy was very much on board with this for the science - so it was definitely very possible to get a zero there.

This was intentional - I hate pity 10s. This game is hard, so when you're breaking with that overall feeling and handing out points for no effort, to me it feels like it defeats the purpose in many ways. I don't doubt that this drove down a lot of conversion numbers, but hope that it felt rewarding at the same time to really earn your points.

As for middle parts, I really tried my best to make them pretty moderate across the set and we actively sought out a bunch of the roughest ones during playtesting. A few did probably end up a bit much after editing - though if I had to guess, I think it was probably the tougher easies and more out of the box hards that were most driving down conversion overall.
I have been meaning to make a post to this effect, and this conversation reminded me that I hadn't yet.

While this set's "no find your ass 10s" was a nice change of pace in some ways, I think it went too far at times. I feel very confident in saying that this set had harder easy parts than any set I've played besides Nats 2019. I'm just not sure that's necessary for a set which advertises itself as easier than ACF Regionals. I think its maybe worth having a discussion of what exactly is the right level for an "easy" part at various difficulties, because I agree there should be a difference between easy parts at something like ACF Fall and Regionals. The one DI ICT I played was very frustrating, partly because in the bottom bracket, it felt like every bonus for either team had a "gimme" 10, except in our/other teams' very worst sub (or even sub-sub) categories, with teams getting 20 very rarely. Anyways, I really just wanted to make this post to say that to me, this set's defining quality was its not-so-easy easy parts, instead of its creative and unique content at something approximating "regular difficulty," whatever that means (and admittedly there was lots of that content!).

Lest this sound too harsh, I did think this was a pretty good and interesting set, this was just its feature that stood out most to me!
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I don't really agree with Will's philosophy here, as I think there's a happy medium between "find your ass" and "much work is needed at regular difficulty to get 10." That said, I also don't recall there being much of an issue with the bonus gradation here--I think in general most of the bonuses didn't need a ton of knowledge in order to get 10 points. I still am a little fuzzy what difficulty this set was shooting for, but if it was meant to emulate ACF Regionals, I think that's fine. You want the easy part to gradate, but not be onerous if you have any knowledge of the topic.
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Re: General Set Discussion

Post by touchpack »

Like Will, I don't think that find-your-ass easy parts meaningfully make a set more accessible. A set of bonuses with conversion 100/50/10 is worse than 90/50/10 both because the former has less ability to resolve teams of similar skill level, and because IMO, it feels really shitty to play questions that go "something I've never heard of / something I've never heard of / something I learned in 4th grade lol free points"--it doesn't feel like the question actually tested your knowledge. It's entirely possible that a few of the bonus parts pushed the envelope too far (scanning through quickly, porphyrins, the Diels-Alder reaction, and Lisp might've been too much), but nothing else immediately jumps out to me as inaccessible. If people think the easy parts of the science were too hard, I'm curious to hear specifically some examples of things they found too challenging.
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