Week 41: A Creature is Stirring
A couple of short notes from the Steak Money Diaries, plus an observation from watching sudoku evolve faster than we are.
- If you wondered whether I thought pub quiz for money was easier or harder than quiz bowl, I didn't think it was either, I just tried to think of it as different. Difficulty, like distribution, is a concept that quiz bowl uses to codify questions from repeated use and communication between people. If you don't have repeated exposure to multiple sources of material you're can't really say something was easier or harder than something else before it's put to an audience. Quiz bowl does that because there is a sufficient canon of questions which has developed over time, and an archive which people can refer to. Without that baseline evaluation, difficulty may not be able to be judged.
- It's more telling to see where a particular quizzing system demands precision and where it is fault tolerant. Quiz bowl has always seemed to be significantly less tolerant of deviations from custom than other events, even when there’s no official rule behind the custom. But after reviewing several different quizzing systems, I’m coming to the conclusion that that limited fault tolerance is not confined to quiz bowl, but quiz bowl’s expansive rule set and communication network among competitors creates more opportunities for incidents to be visible. A couple examples:
Consider that the "year" answer is almost extinct in quiz bowl, unless it's a question about an election. This makes sense when you consider that things like championships and awards for creations in year X often are awarded in year X+1, and people have to consider to which year the question is referring.
Questions where the answer is an election year are able to be isolated to a single subject, and even if an event happened early in the campaign, it's referred to as part of the election of [year X]. They are discrete events, differentiable from each other, and have a unity of description.
In contrast, years are easily used as answers for tiebreakers in pub quiz and other formats, despite having that problem of being able to miss the target by being off by one. And that's exactly why they can be used in that format, because they can possess a sliding scale of wrongness, and still reflect some display of knowledge. Quizbowl cannot accommodate fuzzy logic outcomes, where something is almost correct, and so types of answers where this can come into play get weeded out on editing.
The other side of the coin are answers with complex spelling or pronunciation. Here, we're conditioned to accept that there's a correct pronunciation, and we had better learn it to get within the confines of a format's correctness guidelines. So knowing the proper pronunciation of the capital of Burkina Faso is a valid pursuit in quiz bowl, but if the writer of a pub quiz wanted to retain the sanity of the judge of that quiz, they'd never use that as an answer to be judged, and judged the same way throughout all answer slips.
Something completely different
I've mentioned here that I use the youtube channel CrackingtheCryptic as part of my nightly sleep routine. One of the things about Cracking the Cryptic which I enjoy is watching the interplay of designers trying to outdo and outsmart both the presenters and the techology, in a way that is improving the puzzle, rather than cheating the experience.
Around minute 14 in this solve, the arrangement of row and column 3's 7 and 8 and two 9's is neat because it shows how designers are increasing the difficulty by exceeding the capacity for notation. The sudoku notation of small numbers in corners or in center handle two particular situations that are common: "A number is in this area" and "These are all the numbers in this (possibly disjoint) area." This particular problem created a region where neither notation completely applied (there were two 9's, an 8, and a 7, but the rules of their placement were too complex for either notation to cover. Here the designers presented a problem which was meant to overload not the players but the established conventions. It made the puzzle harder to solve for top-line competitors (or youtube presenters) but didn't really make the solution any more difficult for ordinary solvers. That's kind of a lost skill in quiz bowl, to make something differentiating on the top level without making things impenetrable to mid-level players.
I'm on vacation from my day job from today until next year. Hopefully by next week I will be well into writing several chapters of the book to be, and I'll share something from that here.