Week 116: HSNCT, Redactle, Superstition
And I keep asking "Are we back?" and find the answer unsatisfying.
I've been working through Redactle after a suggestion twitter recommendation from Josh Hill. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Redactle is a daily game where you guess at the removed words from a Wikipedia article, and try to assemble enough of the article to guess its title. I'm actually getting pretty good at it, to the point where I had my apex last Wednesday, and I'm not sure where I can go from there. So having beaten it to my satisfaction, I'm compiling my methods for how to stay below the mean and median numbers. Then I'm going to go through how each of the methods I use can be applied to quiz bowl.
I usually start my redactle run with “first.”
The reason for doing this is in almost all cases, an article listed as one of the 10,000 essential articles on Wikipedia will have some reason that there is an article in Wikipedia. More times than not it’s because the article’s subject was the first to do something, first to be something, or have a series of steps, where one step is first. It's a variation of one of my more snippy words of guidance towriters: “Don’t include the word ‘famous’ in your questions. If something isn’t famous, why are you writing about it?”
First, last, and current, but you should also understand that 'most recent', matters as well. If you consider orderly data, familiarizing yourself with the first and last is usually valuable because the orderly data can be clued with first or last or most recent or current by itself.
The next thing I do is ask myself if there’s anything unusual about the format of what’s given?
This demands reading through the whole thing looking for words that they believed to be unimportant, but are unusual. "Round" is not redacted as a word, because it has a prepositional definition ('round), but it's not usually used for that definition in a wikipedia article. So when you see an unusual word unredacted like that, it's probably significant.
This can be directly translated to quiz bowl, in that while unusual nouns are not that unusual in quiz bowl, when unusually specific other parts of speech are used, it's something to look out for.
The third thing to note in Redactle which doesn't really have a quiz bowl equivalent is that formatting of text and formatting of articles in wikipedia is honored by Redactle.
So chemical formulas are shown blanked out, but with parentheses and subscripting intact. Also formatting of translations are honored. If there's a Japanese or Chinese concept which has a translation it will appear after the name of the concept something like this (_) The blank character or two usually indicates a syllabary character is the translation. Another version you might see is (_________: ______) where there's a translation and the language of the translation, or a symbol or abbreviation, and a word indicating it's a symbol. Also in redactle, italicized words are used for titles; while you can't see the words italicized until you guess them, prepositions indicate where a title is. Wikipedia also uses specific sections of boilerplate, with titles like "history of [concept]," "in popular culture," and "mythology" which when present can give you different terms to apply to the problem.
What kind of noun is it?
Finally, before I try to do typical guesses like nationalities, scientific domains, the word "water", geographic terms, and the like, I want to isolate what type of noun the answer is. If I can determine that I'm looking for a perosn, place, thing, or concept, I knock out lots of answers which are going to be inappropriate to the article.
So why did I pass on doing this last week?
Well, I hit upon the problem that I can explain now, but when you find a quick solution it means you don’t need to employ all your tricks.
I went with “first” and hit the unusual pattern of two lines, with “_. ____-plus _____” and “__. ____-minus _____”. The _. and __. looked like i. and ii. in a numbered list, so they had to be related. The rest of the lines looked like the same phrase with plus and minus as unusual givens. I tried to think of something that had plus and minus associated words, and I remembered beta-plus and beta-minus modes of beta decay. At that point, the four-letter gap and the five-letter gap made sense,so I tried “beta” and “decay” as the next two guesses. When those hit, I then knew I was looking at something plausible, and when I realized how many hits the third guess had gotten, I scrolled to the top to see if I had gotten the whole thing (instinctive, but wrong; it would have frozen and revealed, if I had hit it.) I hadn’t solved it, but I had gotten one word of the title. And when I saw how many letters were in the other word of the title, I could guess luckily. In that I got a four-guess solution, which beat the mean and median by a huge margin, and got my other trick goal of 100% hits on the guesses.
Redactle is another variation of the guessing words idea for practice that CMU tried, where you have to guess the words that would be in that article. It is a way to sort through the idea "if a question were about this general topic, what words would it use?" As you work through the various options, you do start with general tests to limit the scope of the possible answers, and eliminate the paths you have to go down. It's a slow motion version of having a tossup read to you.
The HSNCT is over, I've sent the press releases, and talked to reporters. We've collected the seniors, and started on the graduation notices, awarded the trophies, and opened up the discussion. I've done what I've can, and took a tiny bit of time to rest. And now I'm wrestling with the question that's tortured us for two years: Are we back?
On one hand we are approaching it. The tournament happened in person, people enjoyed it, and we got through it with some minor hitches, but nothing major. But as much as I'd like to think we're back, it didn't feel like back. From the masks, to the rust, to the travel and hotel snafus, everything seemed just a half-beat off-rhythm. Maybe some of that was distancing achieved by removing crowding from the event: no opening meeting, a smaller field, splitting to two hotels, and an online system of packet distribution that reduced traffic and kept the moderators in their rooms all day. It just made the event seem smaller than it actually was. When you're hoping for a full-throated, brash return to normal, the relative quiet efficiency of this weekend seemed...subdued, like we were almost afraid it wouldn’t work, rather than having trust in it working.
As we did the weekend, I found myself unable to find the right way to promote this on social media. On Friday, I had thought that I needed to use my own channels to reintroduce the people in my life who never did quiz bowl (and they exist) just why I'm so enamored of these events twenty-five years after I stopped playing for championships. But the moment never happened. I didn't have pictures to show, a crowd of teams coming to play, or the right shot of an audience to show how passionate the players are about this. As I got to the rideshare at 4:00am, I stood outside the hotel, alone, mask off, and realized I had spent so much time worrying about the details that I forgot to just be amazed that it was happening and share it with people. That would have been the moment to answer that question, "Are we back?" with the affirmative. And I never really got the chance to.
On the way out the door, after the tournament, as we were packing up the whole thing, I happened upon the extra boxes of wristbands. We had prepared for all the tournaments by buying a large supply of wristbands to verify vaccination status. And as we ended our championship season, we still had a couple boxes of wristbands, enough to run at least a couple tournaments securely. The assembled people asked if we should keep them, nobody wanted to, everyone wanted to put it behind us and hope that we would never need them again. I opened a box, pulled two sheets of wristbands out, and threw the rest in the trash pile. I said "I'm not superstitious, but the surest way to guarantee we never need these again is to keep some." They're sitting in my office now. Here's hoping I'm keeping us all safe.