Week 25: Zero Category Strategy
How do you attack a category where you have no prior knowledge? I have 20 questions about your strategy.
One of the bits in the book to be is to how can one cover categories from a position of no knowledge of anything in the category. I call these ‘zero categories’ because unless you fix it, that's what you're getting. My personal theory of quiz bowl teamwork is the realization that it's not a matter of maximizing your knowledge in categories, it's a matter of minimizing your lack of knowledge in as many categories as possible. Looking at the problem that way you can see why I had that opinion of specialization.
In compiling this, I realized it can't fit into the book's main thesis: how to give a newly formed team a fighting chance in a week. Solving this problem takes too long. But I can lay it out here, because there is a mechanical strategy to conquer this problem. And the basic model of solving this problem, and its mechanical nature, is demonstrated by Akinator.
Akinator was an old website that performed "20 questions" against you to guess what person, real or fictional, you were thinking of. And as more people played it, their answers were added to its database and it became a better player. It was seen as incredibly entertaining and smart, but it wasn't really any sort of new AI, it was using the same guts as an older handheld digital game that played "20 questions", and I had seen its code in an old (1980) book listing games you could program in BASIC.
What Akinator did was build a tree of answers, and through the questions asked, it would eliminate possibilities. Real person or fictional character? Tree branches off, prune from it the items which don't fit. Living or dead? Tree branches off, prune from it the items which don't fit. As the questions became specific, Akinator has fewer possibilities to separate out. And it then reaches a branch that has only one item on it, based on the answers given. It then presents "Are you [X]?" and if that's who you're thinking of, it leaves you happy. If that isn't who you're thinking of, it asks you to come up with a question which differentiates their answer from your answer. Now it has two answers which lie on that branch and follow from that series of questions and answers, and places your question which differentiates the two at that point and pushes the leaves of the tree down.
As I said, it's mechanical, it's cranking out an algorithm and expanding the tree with each failure. It's not pretty, it's not interesting, but it is slightly effective.
So let's compare this to knowledge of a category in quiz bowl that you have no knowledge of. You can either do nothing about it, or you can try to figure something out about it. Ideally you want to find the best possible answer, but that takes time and it takes sifting through rounds to build up the data. So instead people make a first assumption, based a much more limited set of data (the rounds you have seen), and pick "an answer" in the category. This is how you go from zero to one in a zero category, and how you change your strategy from Zero Category Zero, to Zero Category One.
Zero Cat Zero: You decide you can't cover this category and treat it like a D&D character treats a dump stat.
Advantage: You're done with your strategy in this category.
Disadvantage: You're conceding defeat in that category, and that's just depressing.
Zero Cat One: You find out one answer in this category and you stick to it.
Advantage: You're not guaranteed a zero in that category!
Disadvantage: It takes time to figure out the best answer in this category.
The problem with this is even moving from no answers to one is it's not likely hit if the category is large. You need the category to be small enough that one single answer is likely to come up. So the category needs to be narrowed. Literature isn't going to work with this strategy, but maybe it will work for literature from a country where you don't know anything about its writers, say Australia. Australian literature, that's a small enough set of answers at most levels. So if you pick one Australian writer, you're likely to have an answer that has a good chance of hitting when you see the category again. But now what do you do when a bonus comes your way, and there's three questions, and you have one answer.
Zero Cat Two: You find out about one answer in this category, and you find a second answer in this category. You pay very little attention to the second answer, except to know it fits the category. If presented with clues that exclude the first answer, you switch to the second.
Advantage: You'll be able to cover both your first and second answer.
Disadvantage: It takes even more time to figure out the best two answers (though not much compared to going from zero to one answer)
This is the better play, but it does require more work (again, what the book's premise doesn't allow). For one thing it requires actual knowledge be developed to be able to differentiate from your first and second answer. But as you develop knowledge of your first answer, you will be able to figure out things about the second. Slowly you will have actual knowledge of the second answer. And then you can pick another answer and have that in reserve when your first and second items fail you. This is perilously close to actual learning.
Procedure for Zero Cat N where N>0:
1) Determine the category you wish to deploy strategy against.
2) Determine all key words that indicate that an answer is in this category.
This item and the item below are the fundamental problem with this strategy. If you don't know the key words that move you to that category, you have to learn them by watching lots of matches. (And in the book that is to be, the time to view all these matches is precisely what you don't have.)
3) Determine what is the first best answer in this category, that which gets mentioned most frequently. Call that A1.
Again, this process of determining the best answer in the category takes time.
4) Determine all the related facts to A1 that could be answers. (If a creator their works, etc.)
Your strategy is now: Once I recognize the category, A1 will be my answer once the risk of loss on the question is zero. If I find part of my research on A1 appears in the question, I can take risk and answer with possibility of loss.
If N=1: end study
else:
5) Determine all the necessary characteristics about A1 that if you find something in the question is counter to that definition, you know the question's answer is not A1.
6) Determine what is the second best answer in this category, that which gets mentioned second-most frequently. Call that A2.
Your strategy is now: Once I recognize the category, A1 will be my answer once the risk of loss on the question is zero. If I find information in the question contrary to my research on A1, I will switch my answer to A2 when there is no risk. If I find part of my research on A1 appears in the question, I can take risk and answer with possibility of loss.
Now, I'll admit, this is kind of a dumb strategy in general for humans to use in quiz bowl, because so much of the tree of answers in our head is already populated. We enter into quizbowl knowing lots of things in lots of categories, and we don't need to follow that path for things we know. But when we don't know anything in a category, such a strategy for muddling through is sufficient, until we can get some sort of basic orienting knowledge in the category. And if the category itself is narrowly defined, you may never need to know anything more.
For example: I don't know much about Australian Literature, but my knowledge of it throughout my playing career mirrors the process of learning a zero category. During playing in college, I knew about Patrick White (Nobel), then learned about Peter Carey (Booker Prize), and Thomas Keneally (Schindler's Ark, filmed as Schindler's List), and I knew the name of Banjo Patterson if nothing else. After college I picked up the art critic and historian Robert Hughes. (I exclude JM Coetzee from this list because when I was in college, he hadn't emigrated to Australia from South Africa, and thus has always been in that particular stack in my mind.) That was sufficient to get me through most questions about Australian literature, even if it only is surface knowledge. Last week I stumbled across knowledge of the existence of Xavier Herbert, that will end up being my A6 or A7 in this category, if I remember the details.
Stuff to Read
Stuff to Look at
Starry Night by Van Gogh
Histories of thirty fonts that aren't Cooper Black.
The architecture of Richard Rogers
The Casa Azul of Frida Kahlo has an online tour.
The Articles I Learned From This Week
The first Tour de France (while the latest one goes on)
This article checks every box I need to see to recommend it, pigment chemistry and a link from ancient Egypt to Raphael to Sir Humphry Davy.
The Articles You Can Learn From This Week
The avocado, evolutionary throwback
Six movies that changed their endings
I'll admit to pulling this article on noble gas compounds from wikipedia because of laziness, but like questions on Midas which fit a type, there's a class of questions where what writers most frequently include as midlevel clues are exceptions to their general nature. Outliers to general trends are common clues, but in the case of noble gas questions, compounds are outright contrary to the general case, and as such it's almost forced on the writer to include such clues. I'll try to come up with more examples.
Didn’t You Learn Anything from Last Time?
1
Prior to the events which caused the downfall of the main character, his ship is besieged by ice mast-high "as green as emerald."
A. Name this poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which a Wedding-Guest is captured by the story of a sailor's cursed journey.
answer: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
B. The ancient mariner was cursed for the act of shooting this bird which earlier in his tale, helped lead the ship out of an ice field.
answer: albatross
C. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was one of four poems contributed by Coleridge to this collaboration, the rest were written by William Wordsworth.
answer: Lyrical Ballads
2
A circle in the lower center of this painting contains the lips of a lamb and a green-faced man, and upon its top left sits a milkmaid at work.
A. Name this depiction of Vitebsk, the childhood home of Marc Chagall.
answer: I and the Village
B. This painting by Chagall explicitly depicts Jesus with Jewish symbolism, and depicts the victims of pogroms at Jesus' feet.
answer: White Crucifixion
C. Chagall's painting of this city "Through the Window" shows a parachutist, and the Eiffel Tower
answer: Paris
3
Prime Minister Richard Squires had been embezzling German war reparations, and as that was announced by his finance minister, a mob of nearly 10,000 attacked the assembly in the Colonial Building.
A. This describes a February 1932 riot in what island now part of Canada along with Labrador.
answer: Newfoundland
B. Newfoundland at the time held this status of an autonomous community within the British Empire.
answer: Dominion
C. Accompanying Squires during this ordeal was this man, his campaign manager, who later became the first premier of Newfoundland as a Canadian province.
answer: Joey Smallwood
4
Due to a fracture in California Republican politics, the presidential nominee in 1916 accidentally slighted the governor, possibly leading to his loss in the election.
A. Name that nominee, who stepped down from the Supreme Court to run in the Presidential campaign.
answer: Charles Evans Hughes
B. This governor of California had run for Vice President on a ticket with Teddy Roosevelt four years earlier.
answer: Hiram Johnson
C. During a visit to the state, Hughes was kept away from Johnson by enemies of this faction of Republicans, which was the official name of the "Bull Moose" party.
answer: Progressive
5
Because he was aided by Iolaus in slaying the Lernean Hydra, it was judged that his action was invalid, and did not satisfy the demands of the king.
A. Name this mythological figure who was then tasked with an eleventh labor: to steal the apples of the Hesperides.
answer: Hercules or Heracles
B. This king of Tiryns assigned Heracles ten labors.
answer: Eurystheus
C. Eurystheus then added a twelfth labor after deciding that Heracles' acceptance of payment for this janitorial labor invalidated it.
answer: cleaning the Augean stables (accept equivalents)