Week 206: Opera and Clue Placement

Rejiggering what I wanted to say, and deciphering the TV show further

Feb 22, 2024

So in my botched lesson plan from last week, I gave them the layout to pyramidal questions and attempted to first explain what sort of clues come in each spot in the question. Then I attempted to dissect the subject of Opera questions into how those clues will arrive. I had done part of this before on the facebook page, but I hadn’t tied the two parts together.

Last Clues

[I've discussed these before with the team, but I had new players in the mix who haven't seen this information. The immediate problem I found with this was that it's very difficult for me to teach this where it's new for half the audience and review for the other. I started off badly and stumbled through the whole presentation. ]

Last Clues are the one essential short description that the writer gives to ensure the greatest chance that the question is answered. They're the last chance to prevent the question from going dead. Last Clues have to be able to stand on their own, in case someone has zoned out on all the other clues. Last Clues have to be uniquely identifying for that same reason.

So if the question is about a country, the last clue is a capital.
As we've seen on the show: A president-> Their position in the sequence
A chemical element -> its symbol or atomic number

The last clue can be a compound clue to get to uniquely identifying: “Name this [work type] featuring [character] by [author]”

First Clues

First clues, the first thing read in the question must be uniquely identifying. The first clue has to at least have the possibility of someone buzzing in on them alone. They are usually very detail-oriented, and the detail is something that is memorable or weird, or unique by itself. They are interesting enough that people remember them, because they are usually the ones that inspired the writer to write the question in the first place. So when you hear something neat about something, expect that it was at least interesting enough that someone else might have the same idea when writing a question. In theory, the first clue is the most obscure fact included in the question. In practice, it's one of the facts about the answer known by the smallest percentage of people.

The Identifier

The identifier is the clue that narrows the set of possible answers to a class of answer. The key phrase is either a pronoun or a demonstrative pronoun with a classifying noun: “This person” [I screwed this up by making the abbreviation pr. for pronoun and then reading it in practice as preposition. Five minutes lost as I made no sense here.] There is always something in the first clues which narrows the answer down.

Middle Clues

The middle clues are information where we try to arrange clues from most obscure first to least obscure last. This is not absolute, sometimes you have to make the sentences flow correctly, but it's the goal. A common practice to present information twice: a description of the clue and the clue’s name. And the middle clues always point to the same answer as the First Clues. They are not always directly phrased as clues. Part of the clue may be that a clue of that type exists for the answer. (If a clue says this opera is usually paired in performance with another one, it means it’s shorter than normal, which is significant.)

And the one thing about middle clues that traps players a lot, they are NOT NECESSARILY UNIQUELY IDENTIFYING over all possible answers, but they are uniquely identifying with respect to what has been eliminated by prior clues. [This was the part I really wanted to hit with great clarity, because if there's one problem the team has is catching how a middle clue might be true for multiple things, but only true over ALL the clues for the answer. But I didn't stick this landing. ]

At this point I shifted the focus to opera, and the next slide showed them the pages to review this week: The You Gotta Know for Opera and the two operas that weren't on that list but could have been: The Ring Cycle and Porgy and Bess (The "oh yeah, that is classified as opera, isn't it?")

https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/operas.html
https://finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/173342/Wagners-Ring-Viewers-Guide.pdf
https://www.eno.org/operas/porgy-and-bess/

And I turned to the high school distribution to show it's slightly more often seen than psychology from the week before. https://www.naqt.com/hs/distribution.jsp

So Why Use Opera as this Example?

Plots are simple and can be explained in one-two paragraphs, to give enough detail to answer the question.

Only 12-15 operas show up in high school competition. (Which we just gave you on the previous slide.)

The typical first clues get used frequently. (e.g., Aida’s first clues often tie to the first performance.) The last clues are also pretty standardized.

Usually composer is held until the last clue, and the setting is often here because it’s a uniquely identifying combination of clues with the composer: “Name this Rossini opera featuring a Swiss patriot.”, “Name this Verdi opera set in and first performed in Egypt.”

At this point I was running late to get a full packet read in the remaining time, so I just threw this slide up. Had I had the time, I would have covered each section in total. In spite of that, I think this is a good way to divide up how tossup questions get composed and how the need to be solved.

Oh no, he’s figured out how to access captions.

Syracuse

I've started running through the episodes of KD Quiz with their playoff game to go off next month, and I got a little bit of confirmation about my theories about the writer of the show. One of the questions in the episode which aired on Saturday referenced the city of Syracuse, pointing out it was the home of a university which plays in the Big East Conference. This mistake is simply that the past tense should have been used here, or that the ACC should have been mentioned as Syracuse left the Big East with Pitt in 2014. As I had mentioned in the newsletter about conference migration last year, conference affiliation has become a problematic clue for use in any sort of quiz bowl for the immediate future. I'm not overly concerned with its use here except that there was a ten-year gap unaccounted for by the clue. There's two ways to interpret the clue's use. One is the possibility that the question was written over eleven years ago and was not updated at all in that time. This seems highly unlikely given the format was changed much more recently and the question matches the new format. The more charitable, and more likely reason may simply be that the writer, like me had Syracuse in the Big East for their most of their life, and muscle memory for a final clue pulled from longer term memory. The editor being of that same age, didn't catch the mistake, and the show's producers being around the same age as me, didn't catch the mistake when glancing over it. I confess I might not have noticed the mistake myself were it not for writing that column a couple of months ago, and trying to reconstruct the past 25 years of conference migration. This does add evidence to my theory about the writer that they had some familiarity with circuit questions in the 1990s.

As I'm now caught up on episodes, having just charted Week 20’s match, I'm trying to refine my theories based on additional evidence.

Dali/Picasso/Kahlo/Munch/Monet/Van Gogh/Warhol/Rembrandt/Renoir/Hopper are the big ten artists which have been cited multiple times so far, that seems a fairly standard top ten. There's still room for Rodin to get a second mention in the next couple weeks to promote. I would freak out if Klimt, from Seton's match, got on that list.

The trend toward publicly available pictures has continued. We've had images from National Parks, the James Webb Telescope and Presidents portraits from the White House and Library of Congress websites, and I’ve salted them into the slideshows where appropriate. I'm actively wondering if there's value in looking at a public domain art archive like Picryl for inspiration about where the writer can go next, as I'm coming to the conclusion that they're just looping through the government sites they've been using previously.

That previous statement also indicates that the regression to expected results has begun, and we're now getting questions that are conventionally like the questions of the previous writer. We've seen mythology, Presidents by chronological position, moons and the planets they orbit, and US states as answers in multiple recent episodes. That is going to force me to revisit the stuff I had drafted last school year.

Round 13's 60-second round category was Historical Quotes, a fill in the blank run like Round 12 and 16 and 18 were versions of Potpourri, so the pattern of six rounds in a delivery seems to be mostly true. This means if we are scheduled according to regular order, we'll appear in round 31, the first of a cycle of 6. The previous four first of 6 rounds were Places, US History, Historical Quotations, and English. If there is actually a pattern, we're likely to get an academic subject, and of those, most likely History. History categories have appeared 4 times so far, and geography three times out of 20.

Share Holed up with a buzzer

Presidents' Day I had off for the first time at work. There was a shift to the calendar at work and they added five official holidays and cut five vacation days. This sudden hole in my schedule led me to get a chance to go rooting around in the garage for the third tub of books. I'd also been longing to organize the tubs since the first two were close to half full each at this point, and this brought the opportunity. With Seton traveling to the Carnegie Mellon tournament this weekend, I had to gather ten books to give away as prizes. In addition to the books for that, and any other tournaments I attend this spring, I found my stack of the books that really hit the spot for high school. I'm not giving these away, but they may end up being lent out to the team.

Hello you beautiful things, I’ve missed you.

Left to Right:

The American Political Dictionary, Plano and Greenberg. A 1967 book I picked up in a used bookstore in Nashville. It's old, but it's also incredibly compact information. It has guides to government agencies up to that era, Supreme Court Cases, Environmental Legislation, International Relations, Labor History, Social History, and Government. It covers a crapton of categories at the high school level in History and Social Sciences. All of that is the soft, undefended territory that we mentioned last week.

Nature's Building Blocks, John Emsley. Emsley a newspaper columnist focused on chemistry, compiled this guide to the available elements at the time. It's the best history of science book I own.

The Dictionary of World Myth, which I've mistakenly referred to for decades as "the Pink Book" is my favorite way to get breadth in Mythology in a single book. It introduced me to Manuk Manuk, the blue cosmic chicken of Sumatra, and for that I shall ever be grateful.

The Wordsworth Dictionary of Mythology in comparison is only a basic guide, but it hits all the world mythologies at the depth any team needs to get to 60% knowledge in high school.

The Wordsworth Handbook of Kings and Queens isn't much of a book for providing biographical information, it's been superseded by frighteningly well updated rulers.org, but it filters out a lot of the noise you'd get from going too deep into that website. It's also the first book I bought specifically to help me get better in quiz bowl.

These five are not for giving away. They are lending at most, and even at that I'm wondering if I should get my dad's bookplates that are marked "Stolen from Kidder.”

Last: A note about the automation I mentioned in Week 204: In addition to the simple "fill in the blank with the common word" that was mentioned, this is the most brutally efficient method of coming up with connection (known to the Jeopardy! crowd as “before and after”) bonuses for any dataset you want to use. Now for circuit questions, this would require actual knowledge of the works whose titles share a common word, but it would be a way to rapidly sort out the items which inspire the writer to create from the generic phrases, by placing all the connections in front of the writer and allowing them to pick and choose what to make into their art. I’ll justify it this way: If you’re willing to invest the time in painting a picture, I’m totally willing to accept you’re not grinding your own pigments.