Analysis: Season 1, Game-week 7

-Paul Pop

The penultimate game-week was as exciting as GW6. And this week, we were able to introduce casual players outside of academia, some terms associated with academic publishing, and I didn’t miss the chance to introduce them to the amazing repository of knowledge - Sci-Hub, which breaks barriers and brings knowledge to everyone from the lockers of the thieving corporate scamsters (some questions in this league will not have been possible without it).

While we introduced a method to circumvent academic conmen, we also took a look at a dodgy godman. Although we had two quads with ‘Dynamics’ in the name (Fluid and Boston Dynamics), the quads were themselves quite dynamic. Geographic Information System is a field in which I have much experience in, and even capable of doing supervised land use land change classification of entire states of India. Yet, surprisingly many people seem to not have even heard of this field. I understand this feeling, because until last game-week, I myself had not heard of a field called “psychoacoustics”. So, preparing a quad on that was very informative.

This week’s HiQ question, with the answer as ‘McGurk effect’ was cracked by not one, but two players - Ian Bayley and Adheesh Ghosh. The crackers of the HiQ 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 question about the name for the bipedal locomotion of Sikafas - ‘Dance’ also played very tough and received only two correct answers, same as the HiQ question. Even a simple two word clue like ‘rhythmic movement’ would have made it a level 1 or 2 question, instead of the level 4 as intended. That’s why we avoided adding any such hints. So, these two were the least correct answers of GW7. Ujjwal Deb and Harman Singh got the latter right.

Besides those two, the other least correct answers were “Herbert Fröhlich” and “Masaru Emoto”, both with 4 correct answers each. Gautham Mahadevan, Aditya Sankaran, Armand Sanchez, and Aditi figured out the former, and Eric Mukherjee, Reitesh Raman, Subrat M, and Gautham Mahadevan knew the latter. Cracking two of the toughest questions in the set earned Gautham the 6th spot in the leaderboard this game-week.

Congrats to the 11 people who answered the toughest questions in the set. Names are almost always the toughest in any quiz, especially so if there is no way to figure it out from the clues (the reason we avoid them for the most part, in our league). We included several names of people to make the set difficult enough for a semi-finals. On a related note, if you remember, we had a quad on James Randi in game-week 3. Randi had offered Emoto a million dollars if he would repeat his experiment under double-blind conditions, and he declined for obvious reasons.

The most answered questions are 7, which is 1 less than last game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 29 games that happened). That means that ~14.6% 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 13.61 in GW6 to 14.04. These are good stats given that its the penultimate round.

In terms of quads, the toughest quad was ‘Animal Locomotion', with a 16.33% answer rate, a 3.10% increase from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). Dancing, balooning, side-winding, cartwheeling, and walking underneath the water like a person learning how to swim - all are fascinating ways in which non-human animals commute.

The most answered quad was ‘Microbial Art', with a answer rate of 40.09% 46.08%, a 5.99% decrease from the easiest quad of GW6. Who knew that Alexander Flemming was an artist, and used his petri dishes as a canvas?

GW7’s maximum score was 21, scored by Sanskriti Dawle, partly a result of only having two players in the game. Since she joined only in the 5th week, due to another player dropping off, she has an advantage over other players at the bottom of the leaderboard, as she is quite a proficient quizzer. This helped her become the theme leader for 6 themes and quad leader for one (along with other players).

GW7, like GW6 had quite a biology and engineering & technology bias with 3 quads each (with those themes as primary or secondary themes). However, it seems to be quite well-balanced given the lack of excessive representation of any one theme.

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 seven, we had just one musketeer by Adheesh Ghosh. Congrats to this nature enthusiast.

Here is the musketeer:

8Q) ‘Animals in 12 Monkeys’ - Adheesh Ghosh

Themewise (T) and quad (Q, primary quad relating to a theme) leaders for game-week 4:

1) Physical Geography - ‘RS & GIS’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Ujjwal Deb & Gautham Mahadevan

2) History and Literature - ‘Academic publishing’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Srinath Krishnamurthy & Jyothi Mohan

3T) Biology (max = 6/12 (50%)) - Sujani K

3Q) ‘Animal locomotion’ (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Samanth Subramanian, George Scratcherd, Arnold D'Souza, John Liu, Harman Singh, Santonab Chakraborty, Francis Rodrigues, and Sujani K

4) Chemistry - ‘The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023’ (max = 2/4 (50%)) - manoj saranathan, Rajagopal, Achyuth Sanjay, Ujjwal Deb, Subrat M, Amit De, Dhruv Sharma, Gautham Mahadevan, kiran k, Srinath Krishnamurthy, Rishav Dewan, Pranjal Agrawal, Dibyesh Hota, Armand Sanchez, Arun Prasad, Pranav Bontadkar, Nayan, Diptojyoti Das Purkayastha, and Sanskriti Dawle

5) Physics - ‘Fluid Dynamics’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Kishore Rajendra, CR, and Sanskriti Dawle

6T) Engineering & Technology (max = 7/12 (58.33%)) - Adheesh Ghosh & Sanskriti Dawle

6Q) ‘Boston Dynamics’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Adheesh Ghosh, Ishaan Nejeeb, Anirudh Shastry, Shramanth Rajarathnam, and Sanskriti Dawle

7) Mathematics - ‘Branches of algebra’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Padmanav Baruah, Ronak Gupta, and Sanskriti Dawle

8T) Movies & TV (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Adheesh Ghosh

9) Music, Art and Architecture - ‘Microbial Art’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Jyothi Mohan & Sujani K

10) Mythbusting - ‘Sadhguru’s psuedoscience’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - kiran k & Ramakrishnan R

11) Social Science & Psychology - ‘Psychoacoustics’ (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Samanth Subramanian, Reitesh Raman, Arun Hiregange, Gaurav Sinha, Adheesh Ghosh, Gautham Mahadevan, kiran k, Aswath Venkataraman, Harman Singh, Shashank Sharma, Anupama Srirangan, Aninthitha Nath, Archana Ranganathan, and Sanskriti Dawle

12T) Home & Hobbies ‘Home safety’ (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Nayan & Sanskriti Dawle