Analysis: Season 1, Game-week 2

-Paul Pop

Game-week 1 was really a shot in the dark, with us having very limited idea about how it will play amongst the participants. While many loved it, some said that it requires some formatting to make several questions a bit shorter, and as expected some seasoned players complained about the excess of lateral hints. With this feedback, we had trimmed the week 2 set, so that the game can be finished under an hour. The duration of the audiovisuals have been also been changed with us keeping time in consideration. However, we did not reduce the amount of hints so much, because a vast majority of players seems to love, or at least need the hints, even if at times, we could see some eye-rolls in the face of professional quizzers.

In game-week two, no questions went unanswered, like the first week. However the most answered question reduced from 12 to 5 (i.e. answered in every one of the 29 games that happened). That means only ~10% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail. But average number of unanswered questions went down from 13.76 in GW1 to 12.54 in GW2 (it's not really a meaningful stat though).

The least correct answer of game-week 1 was unsurprisingly 'CCS/Combined Charging System' which was a kol-stylz question with no lateral hint. Congrats to Ujjwal Deb for cracking it! After this, the second least answered question was the 'Haptic' architecture, with two answers. While it was a synonym for one of the words present in the answer, there was not much to go on. So it was a "aaaahhh"/face-shaking/teeth-biting type of response from many upon answer reveal. Congrats to Pavan Nagaraj and Kuriakose George for figuring this out. The next least answered question with 3 answers was 'miR miR on the wall' with a lot of people going for RNA RNA on the wall, instead of the more obvious (in hindsight/or if familiar with molecular biology) 'miR miR'. Subrat Mohanty , Adheesh Ghosh , and Eric Mukherjee worked it out nicely.

In terms of quads, the toughest quad was the 'Architecture in science-fiction movies' with 18.42 % answer rate, a 2.83% increase from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). This quad is based on a very interesting video on the subject:

The most answered quad was the 'Famous Math Problems' by Siddharth Sabharwal, the perfect candidate for making such a quad, with an answer rate of 44.98 % with mostly workoutable answers. It had an answer % of 44.98, a 6.68% decrease from the easiest quad of first week.

History sort of repeated with some variation, with Gautham Mahadevan ending up in a similar sort of position like Eric in the first week, with only two players and the one player who turned up being Ramakrishnan Ranganathan (same as in Eric's game). This time, Gautham scored 28 points, the second highest score so far. Due to this, Gautham became the one of the theme leaders for six themes in GW2. And the only one to crack two muskeeters, out of the only four in the entire game-week.

Congrats to the following players for cracking all four questions in a quad. Musketeers will be rare since only one question per quad is direct to a person. The muskeeters cracked were

1) 'Merchants of Doubt' - Gautham Mahadevan

2) Famous Math Problems - Gautham Mahadevan

3) Computer languages and games - Armand Sanchez

4) Alloys - Ishaan Nejeeb

Themewise (T) and quad (Q, primary quad relating to a theme) leaders for game-week 2, other than the ones which already appear as musketeers, are:

1) Physical Geography - Visiting famous waterbodies (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Dibyo Haldar and Rahul Buddhavarapu

2) History and Literature (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Gautham Mahadevan

3T) Biology (max = 5/8 (62.5%)) - Ishaan Nejeeb

3Q) Title of Medical Papers (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Subrat M and Ishaan Nejeeb

4T) Chemistry (max = 6/8 (75%)) - Gautham Mahadevan and Ishaan Nejeeb

5) Physics - Waves (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Mukunth Raghavan , Gautham Mahadevan, and Shreya Singh

6T) Engineering & Technology (max = 5/8 (62.5%)) - Armand Sanchez

6Q) Technology in Electric Vehicles (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Pat Gibson

7) Mathematics (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Gautham Mahadevan

8T) Movies & TV (max = 5/8 (62.5%)) - Gautham Mahadevan

8Q) Curie in 'Radioactive' (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Daivat Bhatt , Kishore Rajendra and Gautham Mahadevan

9) Music, Art and Architecture - Architecture in science-fiction movies (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Ujjwal Deb, Pat Gibson, George Scratcherd, Pavan Nagaraj, Saransh Mohapatra, Kuriakose George, Pranjal Agrawal, Abel Gilsing , Armand Sanchez, Gautham Mahadevan,

10) Mythbusting - Sugary Myths (max = 3/4 (75%)) - kiran k, Maitrey Deshpande , and Anupama Srirangan

11) Social Science & Psychology - Anthropology (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Movin Miranda , Srinath Krishnamurthy, Venkatesh Srinivasan

12) Home & Hobbies (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Armand Sanchez