Upload Quizzes

We can see the old quizzes at www.dropbox.com
The details can be found on the group web page at http://groups.google.com/group/cmu-quizzing
Upload old quizzes there so that the questions aren't repeated.
It could also be a good source to make questions for other quizzes you host ;)

And yes for members who graduate you can cure yourself from the FeRS "Friday Evening Restlessness Syndrome".

Quiz 13: Friday Dec 11 @ 6pm

By -- Siddharth and Vivek
At -- 6pm on Friday Dec 11, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Quiz 12: Friday Dec 4 @ 6pm

By -- Janani and Sandhya
At -- 6pm on Friday Dec 4, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for a possible dearth of cricket trivia, geek facts, CMU-specific funda, comics and history of Medieval Europe :-)

Quiz 11: Friday Nov 20 @ 6pm

By -- Ravi and Aditya
At -- 6pm on Friday Nov 20, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for WWF (the one that does wrestling, not the animal savers), cricket, greek/latin stuff and geek-ish fundas.

Quiz 10: Friday Nov 13 @ 6pm

By -- Harsha and Gaurav
At -- 6pm on Friday Nov 13, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for some esoteric sci-tech, history, neo-age culture, and some cool "only Harsha can crack it" stuff ;-)

Quiz 9: Friday Nov 6 @ 6pm

By -- Vas
At -- 6pm on Friday Nov 6, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

What to watch out for? I think anything's possible with Vas ;-)

Quiz 8: Friday Oct 30 @ 6pm 5pm

By -- Satya and Supreeth
At -- 6pm 5pm on Friday Oct 30, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for movies, literature, sports (the usual suspects --- tennis/soccer/F1)!

Quiz 7: Friday Oct 23 @ 6pm

By -- Keshav
At -- 6pm on Friday Oct 23, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for pictionary on Hollywood, cricket, comics (Asterix/TinTin) but don't bother about Bollywood or NFL :-)

Quiz 6: Friday Oct 16 @ 11.59pm

By -- Swapnil
At -- 11.59pm on Friday Oct 16, 2009 (midnight quiz)
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for questions in 26 'different' categories, and brush up on rudimentary game theory to enhance your chance of winning while diminishing others' chance of winning:-)

Quiz 5: Friday Oct 9 @ 5.30pm

By -- Nishtha and Pranjal
At -- 5.30pm on Friday Oct 9, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for a (customary) question on The Beattles, and then the rest on some pot-smoking hippie rock groups, TV/movies mixed with of lots of geekdom questions and assorted bollywood facts!

ps. Last chance to win free passes for the IGSA diwali event.

Quiz 4: Sunday Oct 4 @ 4pm

By -- Varun and Deepak
At -- 4pm on Sunday Oct 4, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for an interesting mix: literature, film and music trivia, followed by some more "recent" entertainment, socca' and F1 trivia!

ps. Like last week, there are prizes for the winning team.

Quiz 3: Friday Sep 25 @ 6.15pm

By -- Suyash Shringarpure
At -- 6.15pm on Friday Sep 25, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for TV-related trivia, classic literature (QM says, "Mills-and-Boons and Jeffrey Archer is not literature") and some soccer trivia -- when in doubt answer ManU :-)

Quiz 2: Friday Sep 18 @ 6.15pm

By -- Vyas Sekar
At -- 6.15pm on Friday Sep 18, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for long excerpts (Ctrl-C Ctrl-V) from Wikipedia, Biblical myth, and some geekdom trivia. (Brush up on XKCD and Seinfeld, but don't even bother about Bollywood film/music ;-))

Report (Updated on 9/22):

Vyas conducted the second quiz of the season. And keeping with his tradition, he opened the quiz by (accidentally?) giving out the answer to a question. The quiz had a bit of medical bias (not surprising given the upcoming House season premiere, I guess ;-)) camouflaged as etymology and visuals.

The quiz had a high answer rate, with most questions being answered in one or two tries. The post wouldn't be complete without mentioning that the final scores had a very uniform looking "Bell curve", which is no surprise given the quiz master's fetish for statistics :-)

Scores/standings: TBA (really soon)

Quiz 1: Friday Sep 11 @ 6.30pm

By -- Apurva Samudra
At -- 6.30pm on Friday Sep 11, 2009
In -- Wean 5409

Watch out for some entertaining "pictionary", mostly "fun-oriented" trivia, and of course, a customary question on "9/11" :-)

Report (updated on 9/12):

First quiz had a record turn out -- 35 people showed up! I am guessing the quiz-master was the crowd puller, and he set a high bar for the future quiz masters ;-)

Apurva made a 42-question quiz with the usual mix of entertainment, etymology, cricket, bizzare stuff, and a score-boosting round. Although the quiz did not have a "customary" 9-11 question, it did have a question with answers like the "T-word" and bunch of flight mishaps -- alright, I am just making up a connection to the date of quiz :-)

Overall, the quiz was very entertaining (no one walked out ;-)) with a very few unanswered questions. Looking forward to Vyas's quiz on Friday!

Scores/standings: TBA

Quiz Club 2.0

Announcing the second season …

Date: Friday, September 11
Time/Place: TBD

Please volunteer to conduct quizzes (calender on the right side), and consider doing a full/half quiz.

Feel free to spread the word among the new/incoming students. Looking forward to another great season.


ps. Post comments on any new things that we should try, anything that should not be repeated from the last season, or other general feedback!

Summer, so far such a bummer ...

Two questions:

1) Any enthusiasm for a medley of quizzes *this* Thursday @ 6.30pm? Reply if you can come and if you can get 7 questions (more people, more questions, more fun).

2) The bigger question, why not do the same once or twice a month? I am sure a few summer quizzes are possible before the next season begins in September.

Any takers?

Season One -- An Epilogue

A long, successful season -- with 17 weeks of quizzing -- came to an end on the wee hours of Friday night (or Saturday early morning, if you wish :-). Here are some of my thoughts on the first season.

I think we will continue to have another great season next semester. We had a very enthusiastic turn-out -- almost all quizzes had six teams with atleast 3-4 people each -- which is a really impressive turnout for a quiz club in grad school! A lot of people made their debuts as a quiz master, by setting either a half-quiz or a full-quiz. But that number can easily increase, perhaps by having a bigger season with more people doing a full-quiz :-)

And, at the risk of sounding like an (IGSA?) propaganda minister, the numbers above are only half of the number of people who showed up for atleast a couple of quizzes. Seems like there are lot of enthusiasts out there who find it hard to come on a regular basis. If you know why, please comment and let's do something about it.

In general, please comment on anything to make this more fun, like more novel and quirky formats (yes, you all know my fetish for rather complex, convulated creations), more theme-based quizzes (or not), more food/drinks (with a way to procure them :-)) or anything else.

And for those who care, the final season standings are available at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

The top ten finishers, based on the sum of best 13 (of 17) scores, are Swapnil (103 pts), Keshav (89 pts), Vyas (70 pts), Varun and Nishtha (58 pts), Deepak (58 pts), Gaurav (57 pts), Apurva (56 pts), Pranav and Suyash(55 pts).


Thanks to everyone who participated!

Quiz report - a "three-in-one" report

The last three quizzes of the season were organized by Ayan, Chirantan, Srinivas and Siddharth.
And collectively all three quizzes had a great contrast of questions -- Chirantan's questions leaned more on the business and politics side, Ayan did a short sports quiz (which was trimmed down to suit the everyone, especially the sports non-enthusiasts), Srinivas's pot-pourri quiz seems to have started a new trend (that targeted teams -- or, one particular team ;-) -- that deny clues) and Siddharth's season-ender had a good set of arts and architecture questions, which were clearly missing from most quizzes.

Quiz 15 Teams (and standings)

Suyash, Swapnil, Vikram (second place)
Pranav, Srinivas, Vinay
Keshav, Pranjal, Ravi
Nishtha, Samir, Vyas (first place)
Apurva, Ayshwarya, Gaurav
Deepak, Satya, VarunAg (third place)

Quiz 16 teams (and standings)

Gaurav, Swapnil, VarunAg, VarunG (second place)
Aranya, Pranav, Satya, Utsav
Amar, Deepak, Keshav, Rohan (third place)
Ayshwarya, Pranjal, Siddharth, Vyas
Apurva, Kannan, Varun + 1 (first place)
Nishtha, Ravi, Suyash, Vinay

Quiz 17 Teams (and standings):

Apurva, Nishtha, Vikram (third place)
Samir, Srinivas, Vyas
Pranjal, Varun, Vinay
Deepak, Gaurav, Suyash
Keshav, Satya, Varsha (second place)
Pranav, Swapnil, VarunG (first place)

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

Season Finale - Friday May 8th @ 6.00pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 17 of Season 1 ...

By -- Siddharth
At -- 6pm 9pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quiz 12 - Friday April 3rd @ 6pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 12 of Season 1 ...

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

Quiz 11 report

This week's quiz, conducted by Shantanu, was another high scoring affair. There were questions on some new topics such as erotica, feminism, and political controversies. It was great to see a quiz that had very succinct and not-so-convulated questions; for instance, einstein's last words, 3-time winner of Nobel prizes and monica lewinsky's much-maligned blue dress were nice short questions that didn't force the participants to read N paragraphs of Wikipedia text -- that was really comfortable! However, such questions were fairly dry in the sense that you had to "guess" the answer and it was hard to actually work out the answer. Questions like these (example, Godfather's auditions and oldest cities, after the clue) boil down to who gets lucky with the right guess (and then your position in the quiz). Overall, the questions were well-researched and some of them got long, diatribes that were far from the real answer :-)

Teams (and standings):

Swapnil/Vinay/Vikram
Murali/Suyash +1
Keshav/Nishtha/Siddharth (third place)
Deepak/Gaurav/Vyas (first place)
Apurva/Pranav/Pranjal (second place)
Satya/Varun/VarunAg

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

Quiz 11 - Friday March 27th @ 6.45pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 11 of Season 1 ...

By -- Shantanu
At -- 6.45pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Quiz 10 report - two QMs and their forte

Nishtha and Pranjal conducted the tenth quiz of the season; the first half was peppered with a good variety of questions including music, literature (the QMs forte), and some "pop culture". The long connect was nice, but it left the QM devastated that it wasn't well answered, and even worse, answered by the most unlikely team, which might have led other teams on the wrong track. The QM came up with unique way to avoid cacophonous clarifications: just keep the images so small that everyone is occupied with staring and glaring at the tiny images ;-) Although most answers could be worked out, the QM was generously awarding points even if they were remotely close to the answer :-)

Second part of the quiz had a completely different theme, and a very specific one: computer science. Questions like Akamai (with pic of its founder), a stats paper, among other things made up some real hard core CS stuff ;-). Unfortunately, that left a lot of non-techie crowd in tatters, which opened up the quiz for the "someone-gets-it-once-we-run-out-of-guesses" answering mode with only a few teams involved. Some non-CS questions were really good (but not very "workoutable"), such as the Depression era picture and Primanti Bros. Overall, it was very well-prepared quiz (downloading 12 "popular" youtube videos -- kudos for the effort) and the QM did a great job of controlling the vociferous crowd by doing nothing but patiently waiting for the crowd to shut up, pretty neat :-)

And, both QMs were awesome about keeping this a quiz, and not turning it into a pictionary :-)

UPDATE: There was tie-breaker for the first place, which took ages to finish. First question, no one follows NHL/NFL/MLB/NBA -- both teams missed. Second question, Murali's team got close, before they jumbled up the Xs and Ys. Third question, Keshav blurted out an answer, which if he had penciled, would have won the quiz. Finally, the rockets of Goddard blasted Murali's team to the highest pedestal.

Quiz Teams (and standings):

Ali/Harsha/Kannan/Satya
Shantanu/Shiva/Swapnil/VarunAg
Prananv/Siddharth/Suyash/Utsav
Gaurav/Ravi/Varun + 1 (third place)
Aditya/Murali/Srinivas/Vyas (first place)
Ankit/Deepak/Keshav/Vinay (second place)

Update league standings at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

Next week's quiz will be organized by Shantanu.

Quiz 10 - Friday March 20th @ 6pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 10 of Season 1 ...

By -- Nishtha and Pranjal
At -- 6pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Quiz 9 report - groups of geeks guessing about gadgets, games and gump

This week's quiz was co-organized by Murali and Apurva, but the questions were made separately, without any synchronization. The first half had a strong "geeky" appeal, with quesions about "games" (sudoku, pacman, Jeopardy) and "gadgets" (VCR, cars, planes, browsers); the second half had fair number of questions on "groups" of people (like award winners, the vague "popular Twitter users", Madoff victims, most ducks in cricket).

The quiz was very entertaining and high-scoring; more than 75% answer rate because the QMs wanted teams to work out answers. However, it seemed that the working out part made some of questions look like auctions, i.e. teams start "guessing" on the right track, until someone eventually gets it right after all choices are exhausted. The second half of the quiz was raucous; on more than one occasion the (patient) QM had to explain questions 3-4 times. Perhaps, too much excitement (when teams yell "yes, I know it" and start sledging) or may be the questions were really hard to understand (which was not the case, in my opinion)??

On the lighter side, the QMs suppressed creative-but-preposterous answers to connects and had a very useful "introduction to pictionary connects" for a naive participant :-)

Quiz teams (and standings)

Apurva/Kannan/Murali/Shantanu
Pranjal/Suyash/Swapnil (second place)
Keshav/Nishtha/VarunAg (first place)
Aditya/Deepak/Pranav
Harsha/Ravi/Satya (third place)
Emil/Gaurav/Varun

League standings will be UPDATED SOON at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

Next week we have another "half-n-half" quiz by Nishtha and Pranjal.

Quiz 9 - Friday March 13th @ 6pm in Wean 5409

Quiz 9 of Season 1 ...

By -- Apurva and Murali
At -- 6pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Quiz 8 report -- midnight (mega) madness

At last, Keshav rolled out his "mega" quiz; and despite the midnight kick-off, there was no dearth of enthusiasts, both to participate and to cheer the QM. To read more about the quiz -- the QMs perspective -- follow the previous entry at http://cmu-quizzing.blogspot.com/2009/03/quiz-8-stats.html

Quiz teams (and standings):

Ankit/Gaurav/Harsha/Swapnil (first place)
Apurva/Deepak/Jugal
Aranya/Varun/Vinay +2 (third place)
Karthik/Nishtha/Pranav/Siddharth
Suyash/Srinivas/Venkat
Murali/Satya +2 (second place)
Pranjal/Shantanu/Ronak

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

No quiz this week (unless there is yet-another-email-deluge :-)); next meeting on March 20th for Nishtha and Pranjal's quiz.

Quiz 8 Stats

Stats are as follows

Overall 23 Questions went unanswered out of the 56 (including the long connects) making the percentage of answered questions - 58.93%. Just enough to secure the bonus point (which Swapnil has been good enough to award me).

Total points secured by all teams was 67 (including 3 for 3 teams getting 1 pt each the first long connect) or 64 if the connects are neglected. So 64 out of a possible 108 again gives 59.26. Intentionally leaving out key facts from all questions paid off I guess, otherwise most would have been knocked out of the park.

Best answers of the quiz (in my opinion)

2)Swapnil's team had some great answers (obviously since they won) - best among them SARS, Fevicol,The Abandoned WI-Eng Test, Touchpad and endianness

2)Though the couldn't nail down the full connect (which was doozie) I thought Varun's team getting on to the Bodyline angle in that Bradman connect was top notch and one of the best answers in the quiz since it is really difficult to see Hugo Weaving and jump to Bodyline instead of going for Matrix, LOTR, V for Vendetta etc. Their Trainspotting, Lonely Planet and Foot in the Mouth Prize answers were well worked too.

3)Murali and Satya's team answered some nice ones such as Reverse the Curse, Here be dragons,Terminator and Skynet and 20 Questions and were clinical in that all answers were complete and seldom left anything to do for the quiz master except award them the 2 points and move on to the next question.

4)Apurva's team were unlucky in that they had some good answers but their ideas were used by other teams to get some points. They got on to Yoda which was an awesome answer and the also figured that the question on the abandoned test pertained to cricket which was difficult and their idea was used by Swapnil's team to get the eventual answer. But the best answer was Super Mario which was the fastest answers to a connect in season 1, cracker to get that one in under a sec.

Other good answers were Hushpuppies, Rubik's cube and Hail Mary by Srinivas' team, VISA by Pranav's team and abracadabra and J.K.Rowling (I forget who answered that one).

All in all glad the quiz went of nicely, though it might have screwed up some people's beauty sleep and look forward to Swapnil's report and the next quiz in 2 weeks.

Keshav

PS I have posted both this quiz (quiz 8) and my earlier quiz (quiz 2) as pdfs on the group.

She's Done and She's Big

Folks

The Midnight quiz is officially done now and since Swapnil stated in his mail that it could contain any number of questions and since some of us wanted a marathon, I was tempted into adding 12 questions bringing the total to 54, including 16 connects (of which 2 are long connects). Overall it looks very balanced, if a tad skewed in favor of entertainment and etymology.

That should be enough to keep going well into the night, subject to abrupt termination in case anyone feels sleepy though I sincerely hope that no one does.

Keshav

Quiz 8 - Friday March 6th @ midnight in Wean 5409

Quiz 8 of Season 1 ...

By -- Keshav
At -- 11.59pm (yes, we are starting at midnight!)
In -- Wean Hall 5409 on CMU campus

Quiz 7 report -- chawannis, athannis and barahannas

The first co-organized quiz of the season saw Gaurav and Harsha come up with a very contrasting set of questions: a good mix of some highly esoteric ones followed by the much enjoyed populist questions -- everyone had something that they like :-) Considering that both of them were making their debut as a QM, they withstood an unruly and bullyish mob yelling "some points, please". They also repeated the answer to every question, an important quality which is often overlooked by many QMs. The only inconsistency stemmed from their decisions to award partial points (on "connects"). For instance, Pranav's team were a bit unlucky to not get enough points for the "social networking connect", but they were lucky to get points for "tom, dick and harry" connect (without connecting it to anything). Considering the geeky background of the QMs, they often awarded "quarter" and "three-quarters" of a point to partially answered connects; we will soon have fractions like 'Pi' and 'e' :-)

The quiz had many well-researched questions (such as, the Google map of "Pakistan's Siachen training camp", Mendeleev's dissertation, Denver's beer consumption, the impossible "228" connect) and one completely outlandish answer to the last question about a visual that depicted the age of consent across the planet ;-)

Quiz teams (and standings):

Pranav/Siddharth/VarunAg/Vyas
Apurva/Deepak/Swapnil (first place)
Keshav/Satya/Vinay/Vivek (second place)
Ayan/Kannan/Murali/Nishtha
Aditya/Ravi/Shantanu/Varun/ (third place)
Emil/Pranjal/Srinivas/Suyash

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

PS. The title of the blog consists of three Hindi words which mean "quarter" of a rupee, "half" a rupee and "three quarters" of a rupee, respectively.

PPS. Next week's quiz by Keshav.

Quiz 7 - Saturday Feb 28th @ 2.45pm in Wean 5409 (or 5310)

Quiz 7 of Season 1 ...

By -- Gaurav and Harsha
At -- 2.45pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 (or 5310) on CMU campus

Upcoming Quizzes

Have we reached any consensus on when the next quiz is? I dont think we should have one around the IGSA holi event, its a pretty hectic weekend anyway...and then theres spring break..we could have the drinking game styled quiz then :)
I have a half quiz ready,I should be able to do it anytime we have the next quiz...
somehow the posts to keshav's last post were disabled so i started this new one..

Quiz 6 report

Varun conducted this week's quiz for a "record" attendance of seven teams. It started off with a quick written round on art parodies (something that was lacking in prior quizzes). The quiz had a good share of entertainment and literature questions including the paintings parodied in Asterix, connect on Shelley family's work and the town in 100 years of solitude (great answer by Harsha's team). Half the teams were separated by one point for most part of the quiz after which Murali and co. took the lead to win the quiz. There was fiercely fought tie for a second place -- it took 4 sudden death questions for Aditya and co. to break Keshav's winning spree.
The quiz had a good mix of real sitters (like defenestration and a long connect on music genres) and awesome toughies (like "named" Economist columns and park-avenue treaty).
With about 70% of the questions answered, this was by far the most uncontroversial quiz of the season (as evident from the length of this blogpost :-))

Quiz teams (and standings):

Murali/Pranav/Satya/Suyash (first place)
Ravi/Shantanu/Vinay
Aditya/Emil/Nishtha/Swapnil (second place)
Ayshwarya/Gaurav/Kartik/Vyas
Deepak/Harsha/Kannan
Ayan/Keshav/Vikram (third place)
Apurva/Pranjal/Siddharth

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

Next week: Gaurav and Harsha will co-organize the 7th quiz of the season.

Quiz Ready

Hey

I guess Gaurav and Harsha are organizing the next quiz on Feb 27th. I have one ready (in case of any problem) or otherwise next week - march 6th, if everyone's game for that (Holi's on that day), otherwise 13th.

Keshav

The Council of the Wise

Far away in a land beyond time, beyond the seas, a young adept approached his master. "Tell me O Wise One, how do I attain the knowledge? How do I gain salvation? What path do I tread?" 

The master in all his wisdom picked up his staff and pointed towards the horizon. "Far beyond those hills, there exist a band of elders, philosophers, masters. Every seven days they gather at sunset and partake in the most terrible ritual. They ask of each other questions even the wisest seldom can answer, they in their infinite erudition gather meaning out of the seemingly random connections that exist between everything on this good land. Go young adept, seek this august gathering, beg for entry, partake in their ceremony, and you might see the light."

Where  : Far beyond those hills. 

When   : When the last rays of the dying sun pierce the clouds.  

Why     : To attain quizzing salvation.

P.S : 1800, W5409/W5302

P.P.S: I should really sleep now.

P.P.P.S: The quiz is turning out to be literature heavy, read as many books and come.

P.P.P.P.S: OMG! It's only half done!

Quiz 6 - Friday Feb 20th @ 6pm in Wean 5409 (or 5302)

Quiz 6 of Season 1 ...

By -- Varun
At -- 6pm
In -- Wean Hall 5409 (or 5302) on CMU campus

Quiz 5 report -- balls, bats, beers and blunders

77 runs in an over, lots of beer and the unheralded players of Indian world cup cricket teams -- Pranav's quiz made for the lack of good old cricket questions over the last of couple weeks. But of course, where there is sport, there is controversy -- dubious decisions, questionable umpiring and sledging were all a part of the game :-)

The quiz started with a cool "handout" question before the standard IRs and long connects; overall about 3/4th of questions were answered. Teams had some great answers to many well-researched questions -- Suyash's correct answer that was phrased "if we don't have anything meaningful to guess, then I will take a bizzare guess that the answer is Eric Cantona"; Apurva's know-how of beer cans consumed on flights, Nishtha's info about "groupie" sleeping, Harsha's lady godiva answer that was completed by the next team and the winning teams answer where all members gave three different answers about a (pseudo-)scientific theory (and the QM heard the right one to give them points ;-)). Keshav got some good help, both from his teammates (Gaurav/Srinivas/Varun) and from an umpiring gaffe, to continue his winning spree. Apurva/Ayshwarya/Swapnil finished second by an improbable margin of one-fourth of a question. And the third-place tie went in favor of Murali/Pradipta/Suyash.

The only dubious "umpiring" decision was when the QM refused to scrap a question due to an inadvertent error. The unwritten laws of quizzing clearly state that a question stands scrapped -- complete scrap, no questions asked -- if the QM blunders that question. Most people (except the team that benefited from the gaffe) rightfully called for scrapping it, the QM did hint at doing so and then he changed his mind ... But another unwritten law of quizzing states, the QM's decision is the final decision ... however questionable that decision might be :-)
Where there's sport, there's controversy!

Quiz teams (and standings) --

Harsha/Nishtha/Shantanu + 1
Apurva/Ayshwarya/Swapnil (second place)
Ayan/Chirantan/Varun
Murali/Pradipta/Suyash (third place)
Siddharth/Vinay/Vyas
Gaurav/Keshav/Srinivas/VarunAg (first place)

Latest league standing are up at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

Next week: Varun will bring 36 questions of which only 15 to 21 will be answered. That's all he needs to become the first one to get the bonus QM points, simple :-)

Quiz 5 - Friday Feb 13th @ 5.30pm in Wean 5403 (or 5409)

Quiz 5 of Season 1 ...

By -- Pranav
At -- 5.30pm (**early start**)
In -- Wean Hall 5403 or 5409 (CMU campus)

Quiz 4 Report -- "T20 of the season"

Yet another high scoring quiz -- ~90% answering rate. It felt like a cricket twenty-twenty match: every question was being slogged out of the field; in fact, it took about 10-12 questions (one-third of the quiz) before a question went unanswered. Lots of Wikipedia-ing (time to make it verb in the quizzing wold); cut-paste made the questions so long that the QM didn't see the answer embedded in one question. The "ipod" long connect was a good one -- perhaps, the first audio question of the season? Overall, a fun quiz setup by Vyas in a one week notice -- most people said that the room was packed, noisy and too many people were in an "excited state"!

Quiz Teams (and standings):

Ayan/Harsha/Nishtha +1: It was dark, noisy and this team was too far to hear anything they were saying. Plus, team members were coming and leaving during the quiz, which made it harder to notice what they were up to.

Apurva/Pranay/Vinay: Came up with a great answer to a great question (chinese food container) but then they went with some other guess. And of course, they were merrily sledging few other teams for fun and profit :-)

Deepak/Suyash/Varun (third place): Robbed of a fair shot to finish second, but they win the "good samaritan award" for spotting the answer in their own direct question (berserk) that many did not observe. Gave correct, but insufficient answers (the guy who bends spoons whose name they forgot) that didn't fetch any points :-|

Ayshwarya/Ankit +2: Neat trivia answers from this team (like the all the names in the Crick-Watson question, and one more that i forgot).

Keshav/Murali/Pranjal (first place): Considering the high answer rate, they often got lucky with a bunch of sitters. And they did a psych profile on the QM (using their know-how of QMs likes/dislikes) to answer a few ;-). Keshav gets his third consecutive win to start the season.

Hetu/Srinivas/Swapnil +2 (second place): Surprisingly this team finished second -- got lucky with the on-demand tie-breaking rule. They had no clue about some sitters (like Simpsons) and some team members had to be convinced that the female in the picture is Angelina Jolie!

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

Next week: Pranav's quiz. The rate at which we are going, I won't be shocked to see a 90% or more answering rate. Some folks think that high answering rate deteriorates the quiz to who gets lucky with easy questions (and team positions). Of course, some folks like the Twenty-Twenty format. With that, I open the floor for bricks and bats :-)

Quiz 4 - Friday Feb 6th @ 6.15pm in Wean 5403

Quiz 4 of Season 1 ...

By -- Vyas
At -- 6.15pm
In -- Wean Hall 5403 (CMU campus)

Saving all quizzes

Hey all

I am not sure what's the best way to do this, but can we start saving all ppts made every week so that we create some kind of repository of all questions made...I mean we've had at least 6-7 excellent quizzes now and it would be great to have access to the questions. It would also help to avoid repetition of questions which will happen soon. If anyone is opposed to the idea we can shelve it, but otherwise felt it made sense to have access to all questions...anyone else think so?

Keshav

Funniest answer during the quiz

my favourite..which band formed during the 90's debuted with an album cover featuring Malcom Brownes photo of a budhist monk burning himself alive in saigon?
ans: err...oh yeah 'the BEATLES!!'

Quiz 3 -- "the watergate" of this season -- report

Very controversial (but entertaining) quiz -- accusations of (random) question cleansing, insider trading of questions and blatant attempts to sabotage "Team One" are still rife. Apurva, the QM, set himself an ambitious goal of 90% answerable questions -- while he fell short of that goal, he still managed an astronomical 80-85% answer rate. "Team One" and "Team Six" pretty much dominated the quiz, going neck to neck until the last few questions. Then came the QMs favorite "it's not a quiz, it's pictionary" long connect which skewed the standings in the end.

Quiz Teams (and standings):

Nishtha/Swapnil/Suyash (third place): Simply put, they were the victims of all the QMs (improper) actions. They were not awarded partial points or clarification attempts ("www" for cyperspace). A question that they answered correctly ("hobbit") was canceled -- a new process called "question cleansing" -- by the QMs whim, or may be he succumbed to the pressure from other teams (a k a "Team Six" :-)). If this had not been done, this team would have finished second. Moreover, just before the last long connect the QM decides to eject the team's president. Someone needs to call the human rights activists!

Ayan/Gaurav/Pranav/Srinivas: Suffered from another random "question cleansing" act ("mnemonics"). They had a couple of answers that could have gone either way; unfortunately, they chose wrong alternatives :-(

Abhay/Ayshwarya/Deepak/VarunAg: Team that was flustered right from the outset (for some well-known reasons :-)), but they never stopped giving some good answers.

Hetu/Pranjal/Varun/Vikram (second place): Beneficiaries of all the atrocities on "Team One". While they trailed all the way, they did well in the skewed "it's not a quiz, it's pictionary" long connect to force, and then win, the tie-breaker for second place.

Harsha/Murali/VarunG: Quick start off the blocks with some great answers (like "open source Cola") but then they took their foot off the gas.

Keshav/Shantanu/Vinay (first place): Gave some "great answers" to questions without reading the slides. It is rare (or, impossible) to see a question answered in a few milliseconds after the slide goes up. I will suppress the other incidents that also point to alleged, but inadvertent, "insider trading" :-)

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


Need to rethink ban "question cleansing" and rethink the scoring system for long connects.

Update: For those who didn't get it, please note the sarcasm in this post (and most reports). Kurt Vonnegut, esp. Slaughter House Five, would be a good place to begin :-)

February Quiz Schedule

The line-up for next month ...

Feb 6th: Vyas
Feb 13th: no quiz (by popular demand, i think??)
Feb 20th: Varun
Feb 27th: Gaurav and Harsha

Folks, volunteer for March (or you will be drafted :-))

Friday Quiz

Quiz by Apurva

Friday 30th Jan

6 pm Wean Hall 5403

The countdown begins...


Here is a pre Q1

X is manufactured by Schuberth. It was tested by an Army Tank. It has a country’s flag on the back side of it. On the top of X, there was a blue circle with asteroids, but in 2002 it was replaced by a red patch. It cost around 15 thousand Euros. On a special day it had around ninety special word groups written on it. It was made up of special carbon fiber.

Pre Q2

Ioannis Anastasakis July 24, 1933 has been a regular cast member of the soap opera “Days of our Lives” since 1985 as Victor Kiriakis. He has also made guest appearances on The Gilmore Girls and in “My big fat greek wedding”
Joey Tribbiani is a fictional character who plays Dr. Drake Reymore on “Days of our Lives”.
Connect them with another connection.


PreQ3
Identify

@@@@@@@@|:-)


Dont google plz. :)

Quiz 3 - Friday Jan 30th @ 6.15pm in Wean 5403

Quiz 3 of Season 1 ...

By -- Gaurav and Harsha Apurva
At -- 6.15pm
In -- Wean Hall 5403 (CMU campus)

Quiz 2 -- report

Kudos for a voluminous quiz! There was no dearth of questions in Keshav's quiz -- 42 questions (no DNA funda) excluding tie-breakers, which were a good thing to have until the last question. The last question -- a long connect on Slumdog Millionaire -- broke the tie for the second and third place. Overall, (a whopping?) three-fourths 70% of the questions were answered. In hindsight, that was not such a big surprise because of the QMs addiction to "new-age" fiction such as comics, TV, films :-)

Quiz Teams (and standings):

Srinivas/Swapnil/Varun (second place): Last long connect them got them a second place. Other than "tom" "katie" and "scientology", they didn't have preposterous answers :-)

Apurva/Shantanu/VarunA: A vociferous team which took a while to get off the blocks and were unlucky to lose a bunch of sitters due to rookie "answer blurting" and team positioning.

Ayan/Deepak/VarunG (and one more):

Gaurav/Harsha/Murali (third place): This week's top seed got them off to a blazing start, they were leading for almost two-thirds of the quiz, but a middle order collapse let other teams catch up with them.

Ayshwarya/Pranav/Vyas (and one more) (first place): Converted a slow start with some steady answers -- got lucky with a QM's favorite +4 question. But it didn't matter in the end, some good answers ("rolling stones gather moss" and "Augusta masters") and last-minute guesses (music questions) saw them through.

Nishtha/Pranjal/Vinay/Vikram: Gave some nice guesses, but were incorrect. Nice answer to the "tipu sultan" question -- they just went ballistic in answering that rocket question, ironic huh :-)

League Standings (after Quiz 2) are now in a Google spreadsheet at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

Next week, Gaurav and Harsha are co-organizing the quiz.

Ps. Loved the "CCA" question, brilliant find, Keshav!

A couple of sites to get your daily quizzing fix:

From the KQA:

kqaquizzes.livejournal.com

From the QFI:

qfichennai.wordpress.com

Peace Out.

-Varun

Quiz 2 - Friday Jan 23rd @ 6.15pm in Wean 5403

Quiz 2 of Season 1 ...

By -- Keshav

At -- 6.15pm

In -- Wean Hall 5403 (CMU campus)

Open to all.

Quiz 1 -- Report

First quiz of the season had both easy questions and creative answers. 70% of the questions were answered, so the QM doesn't get any bonus points -- given the QM's reputation for hard quizzes, I am sure he wouldn't mind this one ;-) In fact, no one dominated, the teams were only 1-2 right answers apart! 

Quiz Teams (and standings):

Gaurav/Murali/Vyas -- Diatribes, hyperbolic false claims and a team controlled by a tyrant, who gets points for the biggest flop answer of the quiz -- Google searches ;-)

Harsha/Keshav/Pranav (first) -- Handled the "pressure" well to move into a lead towards the end. Got lucky with a few easy ones that they hit out of the park.

Deepak/Shantanu/Varun (second) -- Saved by the round reversals; they got couple of key answers that let them inch ahead until the last few questions. 

Apurva/Ayan/Ayshwarya -- Only team to take a shot at the long connect, which probably cost them a top-three finish. Kudos for that, but then you should stop harassing the QM :)

Nishtha/Pranjal/Satya (third) -- Last minute heroics got them a top three finish. I liked the last answer when they started the Deep Throat connect into some crazy carnal stuff -- awesome :D

League Standings (after Quiz 1):

=============

#1 -- Harsha, Keshav, Pranav (10 pts)

#2 -- Deepak, Shantanu, Varun (7 pts)

#3 -- Nishtha, Pranjal, Satya (4 pts)

#4 -- Swapnil (2 pts)

#5 -- Apurva, Ayan, Ayshwarya, Gaurav, Murali, Vyas (1 pt)

Available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

We will meet again next week for Keshav's full quiz. 

Quiz 1 - Friday Jan 16th @ 6.15pm in Wean 5403

Quiz 1 of Season 1 ...

By -- Swapnil Patil

At -- 6.15pm

In -- Wean Hall 5403 (CMU campus)

Open to all.

League System

Starting with the first quiz of this season, we will experiment with a "league" system that is aimed at randomizing team formations to have more balanced teams. In a nutshell, we will maintain a points table for all the quizzes in the season and every week teams will be formed such that the top-2N league leaders (called seeds) are in N different teams and the rest of the team is formed by random picks.

To bootstrap the system, last semester's volunteers will be the seeds for the first week. We should have 10-12 seeds who will be spread out into different teams. Rest of the participants join the teams randomly. After the quiz, the top three teams will get 10, 7 and 4 points respectively (i.e., each member in the team will get 10, 7 and 4 points each). All the other participants get 1 point each.

For their effort, the quizmaster also gets points determined by the number of questions in the quiz and number of questions answered in the quiz. 

If the session is organized by a single quizmaster (30+ questions), the individual gets 2 points. If 40%-60% quiz questions are answered, the quiz master gets an additional bonus point. Anything outside that range is either too hard or too easy, both detrimental to the "fun factor" (the range is subject to debate, please comment if you have a good, simple heuristic :-))

If the session is organized by two individuals, they share the points (i.e., they get 1 point each and 0.5 bonus points, if applicable).

At the end of the season (say, last week of June 2008), we will use the top 75% scores of each participant for final standings. This way, we can accommodate for cases when people have to miss a quizzing session for other engagements. The winner gets attractive prizes, including the title of "league commissioner" (tbd) for next season.

I will volunteer to maintain and publish the league statistics (though, co-conspirators are welcome).

There are lots of ways to make it more complicated and fun. So please comment :-)

for Spring 2009

We will meet every week on Friday evenings -- 6.15 pm . Please be there on time as we will need to make teams on the fly and get started by 6.30 pm.

If some Fridays are not good for most people, we can reschedule to Saturday or Sunday or just cancel it for that week.

Meeting Day/Time for Spring 2009

Last semester, we met on Friday evenings. Unfortunately, almost all our meetings were held at the same time as other events on campus like the AB films and IGSA events. And, I think that will always be the case ...

What is the best time to meet in Spring 2009?
- Sunday afternoon (2pm onwards)
- Friday evenings (6.30pm onwards)
- or, any other time

Please comment if you have any strong timing contraints.

2008: Season Zero

Season Zero of the quiz club was fun -- we had good participation and lot of people volunteered to get questions.

One thing that we learnt from Season Zero was that the teams were often skewed, i.e. teams were formed based on "who knows whom" and that resulted in a power-law distribution of scores. To avoid this and ensure randomized team formation, we should have semester-long "league" system.

Season 1 (Spring 2009) of the quiz club should have a better structure to form balanced teams every week. In the next few posts, I will elaborate on the "league" system that we can kick start soon!

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