Analysis: Season 1, Game-week 6
-Paul Pop
This game-week analysis seems to be twice as long as the usual analyses. So, pardon the length.
Game-week 6 was hands down my favourite set so far. It had two different quads related to the taxonomy (both scientific and common) of wildlife, which is one my favourite trivia topics, and lighthearted questions from the quad on 'IT Crowd’. It also featured some of my favourite quads from other setters for this season, that of ‘Tools used in molecular biology’ by Ishan Rathore and ‘Hindustani music and prime numbers’ by Shankha Banerjee.
Before we move to the game-week analyses, let me clarify some minor errors in two of the questions. Thanks to Aditya Gangrade who caught this mistake and brought it to our attention. Unfortunately, I had written the chemical formula of bicarbonate ion as HCO-3 instead of HCO3- The error is because Google Sheets (for creating tsv) accepts only codes for subscript and superscript, and the ASCII codes I inputted for the subscripts and superscripts are very difficult to manually read, and I misread HCO"&CHAR(8315)&CHAR(179)&") as HCO3- and not HCO-3. Apologies for the error. This however should not have created much confusion since I had given ‘bicarbonate ions’ in the question.
Also, in that question I had written hydrogen ion (H+) instead of Hydronium (H₃O⁺), but only the latter exist in aqueous state (since the question was about the ocean). This while technically incorrect, is an accepted and standard practice in chemistry to use as a shorthand method to illustrate a reaction. In fact, this reaction was taken from a classic textbook on climate change - ‘Global Warming: The Hard Science’ by L. D. Danny Harvey. See reaction 2.2 on page 17.
Another question with a minor error (by the accidental omission of a fact) was this:
“A raga in Hindustani Classical Music is a melodic framework. If a musician starts playing a sampoorna raga in the lower octave (mandra saptak) and ascends to the upper octave (tara saptak), how many distinct notes are there in this complete melodic journey, including both octaves? Each octave has the fourth prime number as the number of distinct notes.”
We added the note “Please note that there are more minor notes in every octave (which you shouldn't count).” later in the week after Aniket Mitra (thank you) brought this error to other attention, and some people may have been confused, as we were only looking for the seven major distinct notes in each octave - “Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni.”
There was also a question which seem to be unclear to many players:
Q: In Hindustani Classical Music, a tala is a rhythmic pattern represented as a series of beats. If one tala has 16 beats (matras) and another has 8 beats, and the first tala always starts on the first beat, how many different combinations of these two talas can be created? Think of how many times the 8-beat tala can fit within the 16-beat tala, starting on the first beat. The answer is also the square of the first Fermat prime (also the first pi-prime and Mersenne prime).
With the clue about the prime, there is only one answer i.e. 9 (square of the prime 3). However, people were confused about the first part. So, here is the simple explanation as given by Shankha:
The first taal is followed by second taal (numbers indicate the number of the beats in that taal). The first one has 16 beats and the second one has 8. So, here are the possible combinations:
So, essentially, it’s something like a frameshift mutation. There is no need to devise an equation and solve it more mathematically. Just visualization would help (or a pencil and paper in hand).
In game-week six, much to my dismay, no questions went unanswered. I overestimated the difficulty of the question I put in as the HiQ question, and hadn’t realized that I am not the only one who had read Broca’s Brain and remembered the book title ‘Worlds in Collision’ from one of its chapters. Looks like there a number of fellow Sagan fans this season. Three people answered it correctly! This was higher than another answer which I anticipated to play much much easier - ‘Pied Butcherbird’. In any case, as promised, the crackers of this very difficult questions gets themselves 7+ days of exposure on our website inside a picture frame, for this achievement. You can showcase the ‘Frame of fame’ to others now.
The most answered questions is 8, which is 4 less than last game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 29 games that happened). That means that ~17% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail. The average number of unanswered questions per game went up from 11.39 in GW5. to 13.61 in GW6.
The least correct answer of game-week 6 was ‘Pied Butcherbird’ with only two correct answers. This was answered correctly by Sarah Trevarthen and Pat Gibson. Many people incorrectly guessed Pied Shrike, confusing the bird with birds of the genus Lanius since they are found in the Indian subcontinent, and they are also known by the name ‘Butcherbird’ (but no longer in use) due to similar feeding behaviours. Just for further information, there are birds called Bar-winged Flycatcher-shrike Hemipus picatus which has pied colouration (whose sweet and urgent-sounding calls I have enjoyed in Western Ghats and Western Himalayas), as well as Pied Shrike-Babbler Pteruthius flaviscapis endemic to Java.
Both ‘Worlds in Collision’ and ‘Non-cooperative games’ were answered by only three people each. The former by Reitesh Raman, Eric Mukherjee, and Dakshayini Suresh. The latter by Reitesh Raman, Arun Hiregange, and Dinesh Krithivasan. Yet another tough one (below 5 correct answers) was ‘Deep ocean’ with 4 correct answers. It was cracked by Sanat Pai Raikar, kiran k, Eric Mukherjee, and Movin Miranda. Reitesh and Eric were on a roll with cracking tough question last game-week! Congrats to all 10 players for cracking these tough ones which require niche knowledge, careful attention, skillful deduction or an eidetic memory (or a combination of them).
In terms of quads, the toughest quad was ‘Tools used in molecular biology' by Ishan, with a 13.23% answer rate, a 1.85% increase from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). He was happy to include cryo-electron microscopy as an answer, as he works with it for his research. Organoids (a favourite question of mine, as its a technology that can help prevent millions of animals being cruelly tortured for animal testing) proved tough with only 5 correct answers. As I kept saying during the games I read, you can probably crack a question with naming etymology containing ‘like’ by adding ‘oid’ at the end (‘like organ’ = organoids; ‘like new nicotine’ = neonicotinoid).
The most answered quad was also one of my favourites - 'Photography in naming of organisms', with a answer rate of 46.08%, a 14.36% decrease from the easiest quad of GW5.
GW6’s maximum score was 22, scored by Ian Bayley, partly a result of only having two players in the game. This helped him crack the only musketeers for both Physics (‘Fundamental constants’) and Movies & TV (The IT Crowd).
GW6 had quite a biology and engineering & technology bias with 5 quads having biology, and 3 quads having engineering & technology as primary or secondary themes. It had 2 quads of history & literature, and 2 quads of music, art and architecture (music in this case) (with those themes as primary or secondary themes).
Musketeers will be rare since only one question per quad is direct to a person. We congratulate all the players who cracked the musketeers. In game-week six, we had 5 musketeers, by four players. Unsurprisingly, 4 of those were obtained in games with only two players. Eric was the only one who got one with all players present in the game. The fact that he cracked extremely tough questions and scored 20 points in a game with four players, has allowed him to achieve the highest weekly ADS in the league so far - 14.18 (the second highest is that of 11.89 by manoj saranathan’s during the first game-week)! This was possible because Eric took a huge dip in ranking in GW5 to number 61, due to lower-than-usual scores, and then surged back to the top of the leaderboard at position no.1 in GW6. So Eric not only has the highest weekly and overall points for this season (34 and 110 respectively), but also the highest weekly and overall ADS (14.18 and 55.32 respectively). These are remarkable achievements.
Here are the musketeers:
5Q) ‘Fundamental constants’ - Ian Bayley and Nemo
6Q) ‘Tools used in molecular biology’ - Eric Mukherjee
8Q) ‘The IT Crowd’ - Ian Bayley
12Q) ‘Photography in naming of organisms’ - Ravi Mundoli
Themewise (T) and quad (Q, primary quad relating to a theme) leaders for game-week 4:
1) Physical Geography - ‘Geography in avian binomial nomenclature’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Ravi Mundoli and Arun Hiregange
2T) History and Literature - ‘ (max = 4/8 (50%)) - Reitesh Raman, Ravi Mundoli, Dinesh Krithivasan, manoj saranathan, Arnold D'Souza, John van Maris, and Anupama Srirangan
2Q) ‘Lippershey and optical instruments’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - manoj saranathan and Arnold D'Souza
3T) Biology (max = 10/20 (50%)) - Ravi Mundoli and Ian Bayley
3Q) ‘Twin-related terms’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Akshay Gurumoorthi and Seoan Webb
4) Chemistry - ‘Carbon cycle’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Movin Miranda
5T) Physics (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Ian Bayley and Nemo
6T) Engineering & Technology (max = 8/12 (66.67%)) - Ravi Mundoli
7) Mathematics - ‘Hindustani music and prime numbers’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Soumya Sharma and Dibyesh Hota
8T) Movies & TV (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Ian Bayley
9T) Music, Art and Architecture (max = 4/8 (50%)) - Sarah Trevarthen, Pat Gibson, Soumya Sharma, and Suvajit Chakraborty
9Q) ‘Birdsong and compositions’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Pat Gibson
10) Mythbusting - ‘Venus and Dr. Velikovsky’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Abdul Raouf and Anupama Srirangan
11) Social Science & Psychology - ‘Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Sangeeth S V, Eric Mukherjee, and Dakshayini Suresh
12T) Home & Hobbies (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Ravi Mundoli