Much fun x 2

This is a report of two quizzes, one conducted by Rajiv Rai on October 8, and one by Arun Srinivas on October 29. Immense fun came in both of them, though there's not much new about that. Is there?

Rajiv's much-awaited quiz was superbly balanced and keenly contested, with all 17 participants taking part in the finals, if one may call it that, in five teams of three each and two lonely souls. Sumant Srivathsan, Anand Sivakumar and Arun Srinivas led from start to finish, eventually winning by a whopping margin of five points, 27.5 to the 22.5 of two other teams. The final results (and scores):

1] Sumant Srivathsan, Anand Sivashankar and Arun Srinivas (27.5 points)

2] Nandan Krishnaswamy, AP Alagarsamy and Souvik Basu (22.5)
2] Arvind Krishnaswamy, Pradeep Ramarathnam and Amit Varma (22.5)

4] Govind Grewal and Aadisht Khanna (20)

5] J Ramanand, Naveen Unni and Satyam (19)

6] Rishi Iyengar, Aditya Jalan and Ravi Venkatesh (17.5)

Arun's quiz on the 28th got a low turnout, perhaps because it came just after Diwali. Many who confirmed did not come, and redemption, I'm afraid, will not come easy for them. In any case, the quiz turned out to be quite a thriller, and was decided by a last-question buzzer. In brief, the results:

1] Rishi Iyengar and Amit Varma
2] Sumant Srivathsan and Naveen Unni
3] Arvind and Nandan Krishnaswamy

A post with the league standings, written by Rishi, will arrive duly.

The next BQC quiz

The next quiz of the Bombay Quiz Club will be on this Sunday[08 October]. Details below:

Venue: YWCA auditorium on Madam cama Road (next to Regal theatre, Colaba)
directions : get down at Churchgate station / VT , and take a taxi to Regal theatre.

Time: 11.30 AM.

Rajiv Rai is the quizmaster.

On an Old School Quiz (and running around naked)

Ok, the second part was just to trick the search engines, nobody ran around naked in the quiz

Apparently the convoluted directions were meant to keep out potential Darwin award winners... but after a lot of calling, querying and searching the participants managed to track down Cathedral High School.

In keeping with desire for high thinking, the room available for the quiz was on the top floor of the structure (it was a nice school although it reminded the author of priests with deep voices, and sundry punishments he had faced for various transgressions a long long time ago..)

All the effort was worth it, when we heard the answer to question 0 of elims.


Question 0 - What are the awards for the National Remodeling Industries called? or something similar - answer here

The elims started with two member teams ended with 6 4 member teams participating in the finals - comprising of the 6 top qualifiers and 2 members from the 'audience'.

Team 3(Dhoomketu, Naveen (Unni), Vibhendu, Anand) and Team 4 (Amit, Leslie, Sarat and Arjun) set the early pace, especially after cracking the theme in the connect round, with Team 1 (Rohit, Prasann, Saurabh and Ravi) playing catch up.

Naveen (V) had a brilliant crack for "Wellington radio personality Grant Kereama was treated as a hero in NZ in 2004, for something which was broadcast live, what was the funda? " The answer, he donated his kidney so that Lomu could return to the All Blacks - of course the answer was somewhat spoilt by 'someone' who added something about running around naked.

Overall a good quiz by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan and Pradeep Ramaratnam, although some of us were of the opinion that some of the trivia required for working the answers out was really arcane, but then again - you can never please everyone all the time, can you?

The quiz ended with a feast at Yoko's sizzlers. And to round it off, here is a question for you - Which one of the 2 quizmasters is slated to run around Juhu naked as a consequence of losing a bet on the famous 434 Aus SA match? (He said he would run nude on Juhu beach if SA won the match)

Watch this space for answers.


Standings at the end:

1st with 15 points: Dhoomketu, Naveen (Unni), Vibhendu, Anand
2nd with 15 points: Rohit, Prasann, Saurabh and Ravi
3rd with 14 points: Amit, Leslie, Sarat and Arjun
4th with 9 points: Sathya, Aswath, Vipul and (4th name not there)
5th with 7.5 points: Rishi, Shiju, Naveen (Venkataraman), Ashish
6th with 7 points: Arvind, Nandan, AP Alagarsamy, Satyiki

(scores courtesy Amit)

~ cross posted here

The joys of quizzing

Often when I tell people that I'm going to a quiz or just returning from one, they groan and go, "Oh no, how boring." And I feel like picking up the nearest car and plonking it down on them and screaming, "It's not boring! You're boring! Boo!"

Many people have the impression that quizzing is about how much you know, and that questions like "What is the capital of Pretoria?" or "How many Maigret books did George Simenon write?" predominate. If you know it, you're cool. If you don't, it's boring. Well, it's not like that at all.

Quizzing, the kind I enjoy, is not about knowing stuff but about working out stuff: as Dhoomketu says in his post here, about "lateral thinking" and "problem solving." A good question is framed in such a way that even if you don't know the answer, you have a chance of guessing what it is. Typically, the question itself will have some clues. And that process is great fun, especially the Eureka moment when you crack a question, or even hear the answer.

J Ramanand, the former Mastermind winner, made three great posts on it which are recommended reading if you enjoy quizzing, much of it reproducing a primer written by the genial Pune quizzer, Niranjan Pednekar. Check them out: 1, 2, 3. As an example of what I mean by a good quiz question, let me take an example from the first of those posts:

This product was originally called 'Bib label lithiated'. To rename it, six alternative names were considered. What is it called now?

Now, chances are you won't know the answer to this. (I didn't when I first heard it.) But can it be worked out? Look for clues in the question: the most important information it contains is that 'Bib label lithiated' was one of seven names considered for the product. Seven? Eureka moment: Could it be 7 UP? And indeed, that's the answer.

As Niranjan writes, consider how boring the question would have been if framed thus: "What was 7-up called initially?" No way of working that out if you don't know it.

And that's why a good quiz can be so much fun: if it contains 60 questions, that's 60 problem-solving exercises for you, often in collaboration with one or two or three other people. You also get to see the way other teams solve these problems, and even if you don't win, the intellectual stimulation it provides is worth the few hours you spend at a quiz.

While I've been doing much of my quizzing in Pune, over the last few months much activity has taken place around the Bombay Quiz Club. We have two interesting quizzes coming up (Armageddon, which I won three years ago thanks entirely to my choice of partner, and a sports/entertainment quiz), and you can see some reports of past quizzes here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. If you're in Mumbai and wish to check out what it's all about, drop in at any of our forthcoming quizzes: the Bombay Quiz Blog will generally have latest details, as will our mailing list, which you're welcome to join.

I shall end this with an easy trivia question that I'm sure you will work out: Sometime in early December 2004, J Ramanand became the first person to blogroll two particular blogs. One of them was The Middle Stage. Name the other one.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

BQC quiz on 17th

Ladies, Gentlemen and boys,

The next instalment of the BQC has been confiemed. Details as follows ...

Venue : Cathedral high school , Colaba.
(Thanks to Arvind K for fixing the venue) Instructions on how to get there will follow in a couple of days ...

Time and date : September 17th , Sunday. 11 am to 3 pm...

Quizmaster details will follow in a couple of days ...

Pencil it in your calendars; attendance compulsory (as usual)

-Arun

Armageddon-2006

This is from the mailing list:

Sinister shadows shroud the World,
Death-knell signal doom,
No magic shall shield thee,
Sheer knowledge be thy saviour.
Let the war begin.....


Armageddon-2005 witnessed a congregation of the best business quizzing brains from across the country. The onstage finale saw Amit Pandeya (QuestaSoft) and Kiran K (Qualteam) vanquishing the likes of Mitesh Agarwal and Ajay Kasargod (Sun Microsystems / WYSE Technologies), Rohan Khanna and Gajendra Kothari (Accenture / UTI AMC), Gururaj and Vijay (JWT / JP Morgan), G Sreekanth and Sabyasachi (TCS) and Arvind Khusape and Aniruddh (SBI / SIES) to clinch the coveted title.

The torchbearers of hardcore biz quizzing are back with Armageddon 2006, and promise to unleash a whole new world of knowledge excellence.

The quiz will comprise of a Written Elims from which the Top 6 teams will go through to the Finals.

Following are the details:

Date & Time:
10th September at 12 noon


Team Members:
Two per team
(A Team can comprise of participants from two different institutions / organisations)


Entry Fee:
Free for students and Rs. 150 per team for corporates


Venue:
Mulund College of Commerce
Sarojini Naidu Road,
Mulund (W), Bombay - 400080


Prizes:
First - Rs. 25000
Second - Rs. 15000
Third - Rs. 10000

Spykar gift vouchers worth Rs. 5000 to all teams in the finals.


For further details:
Samruddhi - 09833524561
armareturns@gmail.com or dhanu80@rediffmail.com

The Readers Shop Quiz

Quizzing, quizzing everywhere... not a question in sight...

After what seemed like a drought, there came the oasis bang in the middle of the desert. 2 quizzes in 2 weeks seemed like manna from heaven and the group promptly convened at a quaint little place called "The Readers Shop" in Santa Cruz for a "mostly Literature" quiz to be conducted by William Shakespeare... err... sorry... Pradeep Ramarathnam.

The ambience of the venue just added to the quiz as the contenders sat around in cane chairs or on the mats lying on the floor to answer the prelims. Questions included the names of a lovely Portuguese princess connected to monkeys, a famous elegy, a fictional town which has given readers plenty of joy and some googlies along the way.

Prelims were done and the BQC members strolled around the shop, browsing through the sizable collection and awaiting the results... 6 teams made it to the finals, where it was revealed that Godot had finally arrived in Czechoslovakia. While some considered making the pilgrimage to meet him, others battled Col. Kurtz and lit bonfires to put out human vanities...

At the end of the ritual, when the smoking pipe had been exhausted, Amit and Aadisht had created a Guinness Record for holding their breath for the maximum length of time, as they saw the quizmaster ask question after question and their lead being cut down to a grand total of 1. Runners-up were Rajiv and Ravi who were hungry for more questions, but had to settle for vadas and samosas. Third place went to Rishi and myself, with Rishi wishing he had one more chance to light a fire...

All finalists were given complimentary gifts and the coffee was brought out to celebrate an enjoyable evening...

What is a good quiz question?

This from inquizitive mailing list:

Dear all,
following a recent post with five questions, I replied to the quizmaster with my suggestions regarding the style of the question. I thought I'd share my opinion with all of you too, and have taken the permission of my original correspondent.
The example question was originally put as:
> Which modern technology is named for a 10th century Danish king?
I suggested that it might be re-written taking into account this King's ancestry (being the son of King Gorm the Old), or the name of his wife (Gunnhild), or that the conflict with the German Holy Roman Emperor caused him to build the Danawirk fortifications, or that he was responsible for spreading Christianity, or that he was also technically King of Norway, or that his bones are still preserved walled up in a pillar at the cathedral at Roskilde, or that he met his death during a rebellion led by his own son.
Or one could mention something about the "modern technology" - for instance that the identifying logo is based on the runes of the King's initials, or that it was pioneered by a Swedish company, or that it was inspired more by the potrayal of the historical King in the Swedish novel Red Orm (later editions translated the title as The Long Ships) etc.
The core question might well stay the same, but the quizzing I knew and loved during my college days was full of trivia which promoted lateral thinking. Even if I wouldn't be able to answer a question, my interest would be piqued and I would tend to learn more - then and later - than if a dry fact were sought.

I completely agree. The joy of answering a question from clues is a victory of problem solving over knowledge. While one of the joys is getting to know some trivia or connection as part of the question or the answer (as pointed out in the mail above), there is also the joy of inspired guesswork based on some clue which sparks off a lateral connection in your mind.

Let me illustrate through an example. In the last BQC quiz that I attended, Gaurav had a theme round. 6 questions, the answers of which all connected to one common theme.

The answer to the first question was Mirabai and the answer to the second question was Comedy of Errors. This is when another team got the answer. We had to go for the theme at that moment itself and risk getting -2 points. However, unless we went for it, the other team would have taken the lead from us. My philosophy of quizzing these days is go for it. I did.

I knew that Comedy of Errors had been made into Angoor in the 70s. Sanjeev Kumar acted in it. However, I could not imagine what connection Sanjeev Kumar had with Mirabai. Hence, I went to Mirabai. The piece of trivia I knew about her was that M.S. had acted in the movie. However, I could not find any connection with Angoor. Somewhere in my stomach Gulzar came up. Some quiz question somewhere. Gulzar probably directed Meera. I don't know why. Then, I realised that he could have been the director of Angoor. Then I realised that he probably is. Since it was Gaurav, it had to be a popular culture connection.

I wrote Gulzar. It was correct. All because of some lateral connection.

Anyway, the question now is what makes a good quiz question? Two things we have talked about are:

1. Should have clues which enable 'working out', lateral thinking, problem solving...
2. Should be enriching - have interesting facts, make people find out more about a book, a film, an event in history. I remember reading Umberto Eco due to quizzes I attended in school. The way to do this is to make the question a reflection of ourselves, our tastes.
   

I can think of one more criteria:
This question should not be too long and definitely should not be a string of factoids. Any question which takes more than 30-45 seconds to tell is probably too long. Any more and it reflects either of two things: a) the quizmaster is lazy not to frame the question properly and thus rattles a huge set of facts. b) the quizmaster hasn't been able to prioritise properly and thus presents all the facts.

What else? By the way, are these criteria correct? And don't you think I have way too much time?