Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Quiz 16 - Friday May 1st @ 6.30pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 16 of Season 1 ...

By -- Siddharth Srinivas
At -- 6.30pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Quiz 15 - Friday April 24th @ 6pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 15 of Season 1 ...

By -- Chirantan/Ayan
At -- 6pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Quiz 14 report -- the new "Darwin Answer" award

Pradipta came out of his (Jordan-esque?) retirement to conduct the 14th quiz of the season. It was long affair of 50 questions that had no bells and whistles, such as long connects and theme questions. QM did a good job of keeping the questions short and simple that helped keep up a good quizzing pace. Of course, there was an occasional "give me the funda" question, and the QM encouraged preposterous "fundas" for these questions by instituting the "Darwin Answer" award for the most ludicrous funda. Team 1, Team 2 and Team 5 all had a notorious history of coming up with such answers and they put on a great fight for the coveted award, but the game was all over when Team 2's VarunAg hit an home run with a serious-but-ridiculous answer that turned the last French WW-II veteran into an Indian citizen rooted in the bowels of Madhya Pradesh :-) To sum up, the QM, under the influence of Scottish beverages, had nice and easy questions that kept the quiz a very close affair, with no clear winners until the last question.

Teams (and standings):

Ayan, Nishtha, Samir, Vyas (second place)
Ravi, Srinivas, Swapnil, VarunAg (first place)
Chirantan, Keshav, Suyash, Vikram (third place)
Aranya, Gaurav, Pranav, Satya
Apurva, Deepak,Shiva + 2
Siddharth, Utsav, Varun, Vinay

League standings are up at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

Monday, April 13, 2009

Quiz 14 - Friday April 17th @ 6pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 14 of Season 1 ...

By -- Pradipta
At -- 6pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Quiz 13 -- midnight thinking (like a legend)

Yet another successful, well-attended midnight quiz with five rounds of questions (two regular rounds interleaved between three written rounds).
The quiz was conducted by the legendary Apurva Samudra of the "I need 3 out of the 4 items for any points, i repeat: 3 out of 4 are needed even if you guess the connect properly" fame.
Surprisingly, Apurva made a quiz where the rule of thumb was NOT "think entertainment", but just "think" -- perhaps a first for Apurva, despite his legendary quizzing experience in the foothills of the Himalayas ;)

If I could extend the rule of thumb, I would say it was "think simple". Most questions were simple in the sense that the answer was either the first/obvious guess or the simplest thing that you could workout (trait of a legend!). Unforturtunately, some teams often went down the complicated path, most notably on the Thums-Up and SETI @ home question.
Lots of sledging and begging (for half points) by the participants made for a lively quiz -- yet another mark of a quizzing legend :-)

Teams (and standings):

Ankit, Rohan, Srinivas, Varun (third place)
Deepak, Pranav, Shantanu, Siddharth
Emil, Suyash, Swapnil, Varun (first place)
Harsha, Pranjal, Sameer, Satya
Gaurav, Shiva, VarunAg, Vyas (second place)
Keshav, Nishtha, Rahul, Vinay

Standings are available at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Quiz 13 - Friday April 10th @ 11.59pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 13 of Season 1 ...

By -- Apurva
At -- 11.59pm (midnight start)
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Quiz 12 report

It took dozen quizzes before a QM earned bonus points for a "regular" quiz -- Suyash's debut(?) quiz was just a perfect mix of easy and hard ones. The QM lived up to the pre-game rumors about his expertise -- girls galore -- with questions that impressed the women quizzers (and the men too :-)) The quiz was a pleasant surprise for people who had a bit too much of "tech trivia" over the last few weeks. Many questions had a touch of language and literature. The hard ones were really well-researched questions, which often went unanswered unless a hint was offered by the QM; my favorite one was the "directed graph" of languages depicting the use of the phrases like "it's all greek to me" -- very impressive way to frame an etymology question. While these hard questions were rarely answered without a clue, most teams earned points on the easy direct ones like FulhamFC and units of measurements.
Overall, Suyash did a great job at controlling the quiz -- he managed time at second-level granularity ("you have 25 seconds to answer") and he put a limit on long diatribes ("you can give me a answer in at most 5 words") :-)

Teams (and standings)

Aditya/Pranav/Ravi
Deepak/Emil/Satya/Shreyas (second place)
Harsha/Swapnil/Vikram
Ankit/Chirantan/Nishtha/Varun (third place)
Ayshwarya/Gaurav/Keshav/Rohan
Apurva/Kannan/Pranjal/Vyas (first place)

Standings are available at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA