Week 125: The Hardware, the Software, and the Accelerators
And saying good-bye to my writing partner.
I was hoping to come back to this week with the phrase “Part One is complete.” But I can’t. Sunday was supposed to be the day where all the pieces got finally stitched together, I’d look at it and say this part can move forward. I had planned to come back late Saturday night, and spend Sunday with the manuscript. Never got there, because Margaret was not good, and I couldn’t let her suffer.
Sometimes the hardest part of this newsletter or this book has been working through this alone. When Margaret came up here, she took up residence in my home office. She had taken on the role of critic, secretary, and dayplanner for me as I worked. There are two desks there. One has my laptop and some papers and books I’ve been using. The other has her chair, which was her bed, a clean surface to a bowl for food and a potted patch of catgrass which sat in the sun, and got rotated outside when she had gnawed it down and the next pot brought in. When she came from my aunt’s, she had had her particular favorite place, on a chair slid under the kitchen table, where the register kept everything warm; we adapted the desk to her liking, putting the chair facing the register and covering the desk and chair on winter nights so the heat led to the seat. She would sleep until I walked in and then walk over to see what I was doing, usually testing, or writing, but occasionally fielding a conference call, leading to her sauntering across the screen to the delight of people around the world. Occasionally she’d tear across the keyboard with not a care in the world of what chaos she’d strewn in her path.
The closest approximation of this relationship is what Raymond Chandler referred to having with his cat Taki. Chandler described Taki as:
Swap out the typewriter for a laptop and you understand her contribution to the process. She watched me work every day on this and when she saw my attention flag and my body language drop, she jammed a claw into my calf as if to say “This is crap and you know it. Regroup. Eyes away from the screen for a minute, and in case you hadn’t noticed, bud, it’s lunch time.” By getting me to stop and take care of her, rather than keep tapping at the dry holes, she helped make the past seven months of writing some of the most productive and insightful stuff I’ve ever written about quiz bowl.
I’ve told Catie that our pets are always with us, as long as we keep their memory alive. In the case of Minnie, our previous elder adoptee, she’s with us until the scratch she drew across the back of my hand fades, and I can still see it five years later. In Margaret’s case, part of this book will keep her memory going.
Back before I played quiz bowl, when I was still in middle school, I started helping my father build PC’s for various tasks around his office and those of other people. So I learned how to put chips in sockets and install motherboards and get a machine to boot properly from a hard drive, and then install and setup the software to use all the hardware we’d put in the case. I haven’t done it in a quarter century, but I occasionally think of things in this context when testing.
Coaching your first week requires you to separate three types of knowledge that you have to impart to your team: There’s the knowledge that you expect to appear during your team’s first match, the knowledge of how to play the game, and the knowledge of how best to improve your team’s performance based on the rules and format of the game. Those three pieces correspond to the application software of an old PC, its base hardware (what you need to just get it functioning), and all the accelerators, everything from the operating system to the turbo button that is designed to get more performance out of the hardware and software. (You may know this as all the attempts to overclock a PC, but I will remember it as the dopey little plastic “TURBO” button which switched the CPU from 6 MHz to 10 MHz. Told you this was old.)
To distinguish these pieces for us: The software is what you know to answer the question. The hardware is the rule that you have three seconds to answer, and you can’t confirm with your teammates. The accelerator is setting your team up with a rule that if the player thinks they know the answer but aren’t certain, they buzz on the first second of three, and if they’re just taking a shot, they’re buzzing on the third second. The accelerators are all the things that look like expert coaching from the outside, but are just the result of bad previous experience or someone teaching the coach to avoid a bad experience.
The reason I’m dividing this up in this way is because the majority of what someone needs to know for televised quiz bowl is squarely in the hardware and accelerators. The amount of things that would fall under software is not necessarily large for that first week. There is some knowledge that is necessary, but most of that will not be taught by you as new material. You’ll mostly be reminding the team members that someone taught them this a long time ago, or they learned it themselves by observation.
Once you get past a one-week schedule, the software section of preparation expands dramatically. You can almost look at it like a long-tailed distribution, and in that first week you can cover some portion of the fat head of the distribution and ignore the long tail because while it’s going to come up, it’s less likely to come up than something in the head. But once you get out of that first week, and your study time is limited, you can traverse the long tail and give them more software to run with.
The hardware, the mechanical rules of play, in contrast, don’t change, and don’t need to change until you’re playing a different event with different rules. That means there’s nothing there to teach in that area after the first week.
The accelerators that are useful for televised quiz bowl, understanding how the writers work, and how questions are constructed, are like the hardware in that there’s nothing that changes with them as long as your team is facing the same format and types of questions. These don’t change unless the hardware or software changes, and the accelerators come from thinking about the other parts, and are the result of experience with the rules or the writer. The book is going to give you mostly hardware and accelerators to start, with a small amount of software, but once you get past week one, the accelerators will start applying to new software.
The book’s part one runs you through the hardware and accelerators due to hardware because those are universal. The software will be very basic. But the other part of this setup is that it permits you to swap out the software for what is valuable software for some other competition. While we’re walking you through televised quiz bowl, we’re giving you the tools you can use to coach a team for any form of buzzer competition, or really any form of academic competition. Anything from circuit quiz bowl, to single subject, to gameshows, to pub quizzing. Once they know the rules, they can deduce the accelerators, once they know the subjects of the competition, they can know how to pull together the software. From one frantic example, your team will be able to handle any future competition.