Years ago, one of the study sheets I had made for college teams was a map of the college conference realignment of 2004-05. I did it for the reasons you'd expect if you read Week 31: that after a change like that, information about the conference to which a school is affiliated becomes something that sinks to the last line of the question, and so even having a fleeting familiarity with the topic is better than not knowing anything at all. Well, over the years that map has become increasingly out of date, and this past month has made it in need of complete re-evaluation. So I strapped down and broke out my copy of graphviz and began making a complete chart of the changes from 1990 on. And midway through it I stopped, because it was both getting too complex, and because I recognized that it would be incomplete until further events occurred. I found myself paused in the process because I knew that there will have to be changes and there will have to be changes very soon, because as constructed the Pac-12 is going to either die, or be absorbed, or pull off a miracle. And none of those are conducive to writing until they are settled. We are sitting in a transient state, an unstable equilibrium that some event will perturb and move us to a more permanent configuration.
If you were writing about a topic which was subject to change in the future, you would only do so to the limit of how long you expect the most recent change to remain in place. So for instance, if I were writing a question about USC, I would have no problem writing a clue about them being in the Big Ten now into my question because I have a reasonable expectation that between time of writing and time of the question being last read in competition, that fact would remain stable. My faith in the stability of that is only based in that the change has just occurred. But I would have much less faith that I could including the fact that Stanford is in the Pac-12 right now, because that's a much more fluid situation.
If you're writing, you're actually less likely to write a question about Stanford in general because of your uncertainty about the situation, whether or not you're including their conference affiliation in the question.
Now how do we apply these principles to televised quiz bowl? We have to realize that the amount of time from writing to consumption can be much longer than other formats. That longer time frame means that an experienced writer is more sensitive to the topic, because they've been burned before, and either had to rewrite on the fly, or have it go out over the air wrong. If the writer wants to avoid rewrites, they will tend towards things that have changed, versus writing about things where change is likely about to occur. And if you combine that with something like a question bank being written for a show that they will use for multiple years, that means those multiple years could be free of any mention of answers in unstable situations.
When something that is fundamentally a last clue to an answer changes, it attracts attention and becomes a reason to write about the answer. When something that is fundamentally a last clue for an answer is about to change, it drops it from the possibility of answers for a while.
This shows up in other categories: questions about cabinet members dry up in the last 6 months of any administration, you never see questions about movies about to be released, and record achievement attempts may get press, but questions only appear after the attempt. I think this situation is unique in that it's actively going to depress the market in those questions for quite a while, to the detriment of those schools without current stability.
I’ve been following the plans for Jeopardy! to dodge the WGA strike, and I’m finding the plan flawed even before you get to whether it’s crossing a picket line. Giving competitors the knowledge up front that questions are at best refurbished from the publicly available archive does tend to invite a particular sort of cram study. It actually to my mind changes this version of Jeopardy! from analogous to quiz bowl to analogous to Academic Decathlon, where there’s a publicly available smaller list of study material you can attack. It shifts the emphasis from what knowledge you’ve accumulated over your lifetime to what knowledge you’ve accumulated over the time since the change was announced. Would that be enough to change the outcome of matches during this period of competition? Maybe.
Unfortunately, I suspect this strike will continue for much longer than either side is expecting, and for shows which demand question writers it’s not going to address the question of AI in writing in the correct way. There’s a lot of things that can be done with comparatively dumb automation that can do fill tasks without ever venturing into AI. And that threatens not the existence of the writers’ room, but the headcount. Assuming AI’s the only threat will not solve the problem.
I turn 50 on Sunday, which is frightening because (to quote Dogbert about Y2K) “It’s biiig and it’s rooooouuuund.” It’s also a point of embarrassment for me since I had made my goal to be done with this book by that date. It was not only a good goal for that reason, but because I wanted to release the book at the time where it could do the most good. Most teams that have zero experience with televised competition that get added to a show are facing a compressed schedule because they are slotted at the beginning of the school year. The premise of the first section of the book is to help those with one week to organize a team, and the later sections are to help when the time constraint is lifted, and then when the goal is changed from one tournament per year to multiple tournaments. That first section is well polished, but the other two are only about 95% complete but rough, and not organized correctly at all.
When I turned 40, I put a to do list for the next ten years on my phone. I’m an inveterate collector of todo list apps, where my father is a collector of todo lists, and I only went back to this one, Clear, because the developer is planning to do a sequel after ten years. Of the nine items there, the only one complete was finishing the first book. I reviewed them tonight and gave myself credit for one other one, “Cook dinner more often.” I’ve given myself credit at this point for this because if we count grilling and using the smoker, I’ve definitely increased this standard, since the grill with smoking chamber was an early 40th birthday present.
Looking at the other items on the list, the ones that stick out were creating a logic text for then 5-year-old Catie, and a puzzle book to go with it. I apparently thought very highly of my ability to teach reasoning and how puzzles were created at that point in my life, or maybe I thought highly of my ability to automate things with python. After ten years, I’m less certain of either of those.
Two of the items on the list, All 50 states visited and participating in NaNoWriMo I’ve postponed until I am done with this book. I’m down to six states, and I’ve promised that a similarly biiig roooouuund wedding anniversary present will take down the most distant of the remaining targets. That leaves Oregon, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kansas, and North Dakota, and those all seem achievable, just not in the same trip.
The other big fail was this item: “500 colleges playing quiz bowl+ 10000 high schools playing every year.” This always seems ambitious, but I think the two of them are linked, and if you achieve 10000 high schools, there will be enough people going to college to populate teams at 500 colleges. At 40, I thought it would be easy because of how few teams there actually were, and how distinct quiz bowl was as an opportunity for students. What’s tempered my view of this has been the discovery over the past ten years of how many similar competitions exist. These competitions are not so much competitors with quiz bowl as much as parallel developments. A student or a team could compete in multiple competitions without forcing people to choose between them. The dramatic decrease in cost quiz bowl has had in this time means it can coexist without breaking a schools budget, and the organizational structure of quiz bowl, allowing movement from high school to college, helps fulfill the demand for an activity that migrates into college. The goal is still possible, but the way to the goal has changed dramatically in ten years.