I need to acknowledge something about the book, that there is a bootstrap fallacy at the heart of the worst-case scenario it describes. Let me lay it out for you from the problem statement:
You’re brought in on Monday morning and given the project of creating a team from the population of your high school, who have no experience with quiz bowl, and by Saturday you’re supposed to have them ready to compete on a television program.
This is the worst-case scenario, it’s the minimum amount of time, the minimum amount of experience students can have, and the minimum amount of resources to start with.
So why do I find it so contrived, even if I contrived it myself? It comes down to one question:
“Who punched your ticket?”
How did the opportunity to appear on television come to your school? When Seton LaSalle was approached, it occurred because I submitted the school’s information to a form on the station website. The station would not have known to contact us otherwise. But what if we were in a smaller market and there was some regular rotation of local schools, and it was just your school’s turn this year, there’d be some past history at your school to work with. If the opportunity came from the actions of some past coach, now retired or resigned, and you’re asked to perform this miracle as part of filling their shoes, there’d still be some institutional memory you could work with. But this scenario, as described, has none of these rudimentary first steps.
There’s another problem with this scenario, whomever initiated the process of getting on the program did not do that as their complete plan. It had to have been done for a reason, and it had to be accepted with some consideration. And in this scenario it had to have been passed from someone else to you for a reason. It may be a bad plan, or it may be a plan that they recognize the plan is worthless and need to abandon it and pass the responsibility onto someone else, but to pass it onto someone else without recognition of their plan's failure is nigh-impossible. You will not have something like this passed to you unexamined by someone.
Your team’s ticket was punched in vacuo and arrived through some diabolus ex machina. And that’s what makes it the hardest problem in quiz bowl. Once it enters the real world, you have some specific resources of your school to work with. Once the problem enters the real world it has the negative solution which the worst-case scenario does not: to assess the situation, and to stop at the beginning and refuse to attempt a solution.
The question of “Who punched your ticket?” has been nagging at me as I complete this book, because in all of this plan’s complexity, all the questions that have to be answered before it can be made bulletproof, that particular question has remained in soluble. But I’ve started to come around to the notion that it doesn’t matter what answer solves the question, just that some answer to the question exists to put the entire solution into existence.
Four notes on the television program The Floor and its value as a teaching tool.
The quiz show The Floor has aired two episodes on Fox so far and I’ve watched both of them. I'm not going to pronounce it good quizbowl, but the program's format teaches four elements which are valuable in most forms of quizbowl competition, and rather specifically to the form of televised quiz bowl I’m observing.
1) On Image based questions. Because this competition is an international format brought to the US, and they needed to supply about 2025 questions for this show (81 contestants with one specialty category, which needs to burn at most 90 seconds. ~25 questions each.) If this were a program that required questions to be written for each international edition, that cost and development time would make it difficult to syndicate to each nation. The picture format enables them to share many of the categories between countries, reducing the total development cost dramatically.
The implication of this, that you could potentially see another country's episodes to gain an advantage on the show in your country is potentially troubling, and explains why such formats are sold to countries even before they are broadcast the first time. But for my team's experience, this is a chance to see a bunch of potential questions that they could face in a different program, but would be testing the same information.
2) The format of the round: a 45-second chess clock with a three-second penalty to pass, and critically, nothing moving on a wrong answer. This format rewards knowing the rules and keeping calm more often than it rewards knowledge. I don't think I've seen a match where the person who forgets to pass and instead pauses a few seconds for an answer wins. It's similar to the best practice play in one-minute match-three games like Bejeweled Blitz, if you don't immediately see the match on the screen, use a powerup to give you a new board with more potential matches available.
What I haven't seen in these matches is the desperation practice of blitzing a bunch of answers in hopes of hitting with one of them. I guess the strategy is to not give your opponent possible answers to questions to come, but I would have to guess that opponents would not be expecting this strategy, and so wouldn’t be paying the right amount of attention to how you are flailing, only to the appearance of how you are flailing.
I think the best strategy extends off of this, to have one or two answers in reserve, react calmly but immediately to the next question, and in a single sequence give an answer based on your quick observation, switch to your reserve answer(s) in sequence, and finish it with a pass.
3) The value of priming yourself with answers before the round. The second episode provided a good insight into a procedure to prime yourself to play a round with a category. The player in control for most of this episode, Tom, used the time between the host leaving the stage and the first question to audibly prime himself with potential answers that fit the category. I've seen this implied with some shows, and I've recommended this to people going to compete on Jeopardy! and local quiz shows, but this is the first time I've seen this particular preparation highlighted and explicitly condoned by a program.
4) The pattern of two visually similar answers. There's one pattern I've seen in the questions which I'm curious about, when there are two visually similar answers in the category that could easily be confused for each other (e.g. lettuce and cabbage, butterfly and moth) the writers seem to have made a conscious choice to place them back to back. I guess this is the only position that guarantees that the same person doesn’t get both elements of the pair, and that’s why it seems fair to the writers. I would think this could be a slight advantage to the player that encounters the pair last, so I'm wondering if the writers have taken the initiative to alternate each pair's position odd/even and then even/odd so that each side has equal chance to hit the pair first.
I started putting together Of The Week on Saturday, but made less progress than I thought I should have. I got bogged down in the detail of having enough articles for each item to serialize it out for at least six weeks, and this kept me from making the list longer. Still, I managed to fill all of the basic pieces here so this would be enough for the team to keep them occupied for the week, and give them a variety of subjects they could explore.
The good parts: I managed to combine media so that there will always be something good for visual learners and auditory learners.
The bad parts: I didn’t get this into a good form through Obsidian, and its idiosyncrasies with respect to MarkDown make it difficult to do a clean dump into substack. The template is currently inadequate, and I had to route this through a spreadsheet, Obsidian templates and a google doc to make it manageable. The format of this is still pretty stifling, I found some things in articles which I’d like to split over several weeks but I can’t see how to make that feasible.
The meh parts: I did go back into things that I have either presented here, or presented to the team as part of study. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re expecting all new material every time, I’m going to disappoint you. Since I expect a steady supply of new students on the team, and people discovering the list every week, I will be borrowing from old material.
The other meh parts: I momentarily kicked myself for including two Roman emperors in the first stack, but I realized that won’t happen normally, and if we take seriously the claim that men think about the Roman Empire far more often than you expect, the oversampling information about something that preoccupies the minds of many quiz bowl writers is justifiable.
# Poem OTW: The Village Blacksmith
https://poets.org/poem/village-blacksmith
# Poet OTW: Longfellow
https://poets.org/poet/henry-wadsworth-longfellow
# YouTube Video OTW: Medical Terminolgy 1
# Art Movement OTW: Pop Art
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/pop-art/m0q4mn?categoryId=art-movement
# Painting OTW: Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/campbell-s-soup-i-andy-warhol/jwEPpXRD0LS7YA
# Mythological Figure OTW: Daedalus
https://pantheon.org/articles/d/daedalus.html
# Bridge OTW: Sydney Harbor Bridge
https://www.sydney.com/destinations/sydney/sydney-city/sydney-harbour/sydney-harbour-bridge
# Mineral OTW: Calcite
https://nhmu.utah.edu/articles/2023/09/what-is-calcite
# Vasari's Life of the Artist OTW: Giotto
https://archive.org/details/livesofmostemine01vasauoft/page/n167/mode/2up
# National Park OTW: Everglades
https://www.nps.gov/ever/index.htm
# Periodic Table OTW: Element Name Origins
https://www.compoundchem.com/2016/06/09/element-names/
# Presidential Election OTW: 1876
https://www.270towin.com/1876_Election/
# Battle OTW: Zama
https://www.thoughtco.com/punic-wars-battle-of-zama-2360887
# Star OTW: Zubeneschamali
https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/libras-zubeneschamali-the-only-green-star/
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Andromeda
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/andromeda.html
# Chemistry History OTW: Bakelite
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/bakelite.html
# History Podcast OTW: 12 Byzantine Leaders, Episode 2: Diocletian
https://12byzantinerulers.com/
# Roman Emperor OTW: Julius Caesar
https://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/empire/julius_caesar.html
# In Our Time OTW: Superconductivity
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hfpc