Week 193: "Everything Repeats" Repeats
"Everything?" "Everything."
In practice today, I started them off with asking to remember the first things I taught in practice. It's easy for me at this point to recall it because it's one thing that plays a pivotal role in both the 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, and the book that is to come.
It's the mantra: "Everything Repeats."
Everything repeats is the reason we practice for quiz bowl, it's the reason practice is even possible in quiz bowl.
With the airing of episode 7 of the new format, I finally could explain to the team what I meant by that in a general sense that existed within the player's quiz bowl career. Episode 7 hit upon several items that were present in episode 1, and in doing that I finally had an estimate to "what is the highest frequency that repeats could occur?" The team finally has a concrete example of everything repeating within their memory, that they can look at it and realize it.
There were several things in episode 7 that repeated or rhymed from episode 1. In the 5-question category selection round, there was another "Starts with 'J'" category. The lightning round was US History, where the one in episode 1 was just history. And the math category had a trick question which while changing two words and the graphic, could be solved with exactly the same realization.
Now I don't mean that the team is going to face exact repeats in their match. I mean that repeats of ideas, themes, or sets of answers are going to appear, and the probability of those repeating is a little more likely than the rest of the field of knowledge.
Things repeat within a writing session. If the writer is going through writing questions about the planets as answers, they'll put Mercury in the first spot that fits in the distribution, then Venus in the second spot. If those are open slots in two consecutive rounds, so be it. It's not like the teams in the field see all the games before their taping. But those questions could also be pushed to the next batch of questions to be delivered to the show.
This could be by design. That "Starts with 'J'" category is sufficiently vague that they could have written twice the number of questions that filled that category. When I wrote a similar "Starts with Y" to test the team's choice of categories and the 60-second lightning round work, I ended up with a few more than ten. But it also could be the writer wrote category rounds as lightning rounds, and so could break them in half. Five questions from the category could go into one episode, and five could go in a later episode. If that's the case, all the other categories from the aired episodes have the possibility of coming up again. Ladies and gentlemen, we have identified a market inefficiency, and we need to exploit it. Any sufficiently interesting category already introduced which could have ten answers might have its second half drop between now and our match.
The issue with the math questions identified above might only be an issue with how repeat checking happened. Since the question had such innocuous phrasing with common words and the two questions used different images, they might not have tripped any memory of the writer or editor of being similar, IF they were edited and created at different times. But this also might indicate that there's no inter-repeat checking being done between episodes, or between shipments.
This is a bit of inside baseball about question production for television, but it's important to explain what happens. When you contract to deliver an entire season of questions to a television program, you either sell them an archive, or you contract with the station to deliver in installments of 4-10 rounds at a time. NAQT's always used the latter to cover the possibility of current events going awry, but also because it takes a long time to write and edit rounds, and it's often not feasible to let that much material go idle for any significant length of time. I suspect our writer is using the same plan, because of the newness of the format, and with a new format you want to be able to get feedback on the first few rounds for difficulty, distribution, and answer selection before proceeding with the rest of the season. This means there's another "Dum Dum Mystery Flavor" period possible, but it also means that things that were written but overflowed the capacity of the first batch might appear in the second batch of questions.
The other factor that leads to my conclusion that there was a second drop was the slight format change. The questions that resemble our 30-20-10 questions added a second set being given to each team beginning with episode 6. This was probably because the editing of the first few episodes showed they had time to do it, and the majority of episodes in that first set were runaways, if the team that was ahead knew it. The format is as follows: +30 correct on the first clue, -30 incorrect, +20 correct on the second clue, -20 incorrect, +10 correct on the third clue, -10 incorrect. One guess allowed over all three clues. The thing is this looks like you could have 60 point swings, but really it's only 40 point swing maximum, and if the writer stays very pyramidal, this is only a 20 point swing possible, because the team that's ahead can just take the 10 point putt. The format after episode 6 adds a second question in this round, so the total point swings are doubled, but the probability of the extreme come-from-behind result drops a great bit.
This is a change that requires additional questions, so it makes sense that it's a result of feedback and change. The format as initially announced made repeats of the last round the tiebreaker format. So the first few rounds must have had the tiebreaker questions attached. Once they got past those first few rounds without tiebreakers required, it is possible that the producers recognized they could use the tiebreaker questions for later episodes in place, while holding the first rounds' tiebreakers in reserve for that purpose.
The other factor that indicated that a second drop occurred came with the lightning round in episode 6. I didn't mention it at the time, but the subject of the lightning round of the sixth episode was "odds n ends," which is a classic sort of category of "everything we have that wouldn't stretch to a category of its own." If you're compiling packets in a serial fashion, and the deadline for the set is coming, pulling a potpourri category from your incomplete ideas isn't the worst idea in the world, especially if you're trying to fill the largest section of your questions for the last episode in the set. (the 60-second round requires 30 questions per episode, just short of half the show.)
So if they're doing shipments, they're likely doing shipments of 6 packets at a time, with the second most likely situation being a five-packet shipment. Why does this matter? Well, last night after practice, checking my email, I got the scheduling information from the producers. Seton LaSalle will be taping episode 2512 on November 29th.
Seven days from now.
When you next hear from me, we'll be done. And I probably won't be able to tell you how it ended until it airs.
But it's episode 2512, the 12th episode of season 25.
If the show is shipped in batches of six, Episodes 1-6 could see their content repeated. If the show is delivered in batches of 5, episode 7's non-repeating parts may show up repeated. Either way, we now have the frequency of the high-frequency repeats revealed, and the contents of the last cycle available to us. If we draw "odds n ends" again, can't say we weren't warned. Everything repeats.
So what do you do with your last seven days to prepare? Well, since we can't schedule more practices at school, I'm giving them online quizzes based on what we've discussed here, and flashcard sets. I'm using online quiz software because it allows pictures to be included to better model the show's material. Based on my charting of the rounds, there are nineteen subject rounds that could come up again, so I'm revisiting the subject but not the answers used. (I'm assuming "Starts with 'J'" is done.) I've given them simulated lightning rounds on subjects in practice, and I will post those so they can review them all week. I spent a little time in practice on computation questions similar to what have already aired, the shortcuts that can be exploited, and I made them aware of the tricks we've seen already. And I'm making sure that everything I wrote in the first part of the book, for when you are given five days to start a team from scratch, has been done.
One last dress rehearsal Tuesday, and on with the show.