Analysis: Season 1, Game-week 3

-Paul Pop

Game-week 3 saw the increase in number of days to play the game from 7 to 9 days, given the number of players who had to skip games due to time-zone differences and incompatibility of their availability compared to the players who they were matched with. We are planning to stick with 9 days to ensure games with four players and space for rescheduling in case a game couldn’t happen on a given date because of some unavoidable circumstances.

This game-week was a particular favourite of mine, since I was able to incorporate three quads involving wildlife, especially my master-piece “Fiction with mammals having 'ole' nomenclature.” The first three questions had the animal names vole, dhole, and polecat italicized. This was done purposefully, as it was a foreshadowing clue to crack the last answer in the quad: Naked Mole Rat.

In game-week three too, no questions went unanswered. However the most answered questions more than doubled from 5 in game-week 2 to 11 this game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 27 games that happened). That means ~23% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail. The average number of unanswered questions went down from12.55 in GW2 to 9.08 in GW3.

The least correct answer of game-week 1 was the ‘The Second Jungle Book’, with only three correct answers. That sure was a curveball question, and many people didn’t know there was a ‘Second Jungle Book’. Congrats on cracking this, Ravi Mundoli, Sania Narulkar, and Jayakanthan R! Besides this, no other question were left unanswered in less than or equal to five games.

In terms of quads, the toughest quad was the 'Women in genetics' with a 24.66% answer rate, a 7.24% increase from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). This quad by Anupriya Dalmia is something personal to her as she also works in the field of genetics, and this was a good opportunity for us to learn more about the path-breaking work by women in the field. Several people missed paying attention to cas9 protein in the CRISPR technology. So, such questions surely are a reminder to quizzers to pay more attention to biological details.

The most answered quad was the 'James Randi' (one of my favourite skeptics), with a rate of 68.46% , a 23.48% increase from the easiest quad of GW2, and the highest in the season so far! Some people complained that the question about Hertz required only one clue in the question to answer, but the point was to introduce a act of mythbusting/debunking James Randi was involved in (which is the theme under which this quad comes under). So, the story is as important as the answer.

As we entered game-week three, the chances of games with strong quizzers being paired with hobby quizzers reduced, and there were limited opportunities for someone to score a very high score. GW3 had the maximum score of 20, scored by Sangeeth S V. He was a bit lucky as one of the players didn’t turn up and the other players were no match for him. This helped him become the only leader for the themes of History and Literature and Biology. We had a high representation of these two themes in GW3 with 5 quads with the former as the primary or secondary theme, and 6 quads with the latter as primary or secondary theme.

Musketeers will be rare since only one question per quad is direct to a person. This game-week, we had only a single musketeer!

3Q) 'Women in Genetics' - Ian Bayley.

Congrats on cracking the toughest quad in the set, Ian!

Themewise (T) and quad (Q, primary quad relating to a theme) leaders for game-week 3, other than the ones which already appear as musketeers, are:

1) Physical Geography - ‘Islands of Greece’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Aditya Gangrade & Pranjal Agrawal

2T) History and Literature (max = 11/20 (~55%)) - Sangeeth S V

2Q) ‘Fiction with mammals having 'ole' nomenclature’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - George Scratcherd & Sangeeth S V

3T) Biology (max = 13/24 (54.17%)) - Sangeeth S V

4) Chemistry - ‘Chemical reactions’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Maitrey Deshpande

5) Physics - ‘Tesla’s ideas’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Mukunth Raghavan , Gautham Mahadevan, and Shreya Singh

6) Engineering & Technology - ‘Internet of Things’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Jimmy Li & Kunal Mandal

7) Mathematics - ‘The Great Trigonometric Survey of India’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Sania Narulkar, Shashank Tyagi, Nikhil Sonde & Reitesh Raman

8) Movies & TV - ‘Reptiles in James Bond movies’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Samanth Subramanian & Padmanav Baruah

9) Music, Art and Architecture - ‘Molecular music’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Ronak Gupta, Dinesh Krithivasan, Abdul Raouf & Hari Parameswaran

10) Mythbusting - ‘James Randi’ (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Arun Hiregange, Sarah Trevarthen, Seoan Webb, Dinesh Krithivasan, Aditya Gangrade, Jayakanthan R, Nikhil Sonde, Dibyesh Hota, Aninthitha Nath, Hrishikesh Varma, Dakshayini Suresh, Hari Parameswaran & Vigneshwaran A

11) Social Science & Psychology - ‘Psychological experiments’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Movin Miranda, Aditya Gangrade, Nikhil Sonde, John McKenzie, Venkatesh Srinivasan, Pranjal Agrawal, Francis Rodrigues, Hari Parameswaran & Sangeeth S V

12) Home & Hobbies - ‘Philately of Mangroves’ (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Ishaan Nejeeb, Ujjwal Deb, Dhruv Sharma, Dibyo Haldar, Anupama Srirangan, Aniket Mitra, Aditya Sankaran, Vinod Hariharan, Suvajit Chakraborty, manoj saranathan, Reitesh Raman, Praveen VR, Carlo J Aiello, Sanat Pai Raikar & Sanveer Singh Puri