Analysis: Season 2, Game-week 1

- Paul Pop

Nearly 8 months had elapsed before we started the second season on 26th July 2024. A lot of preparation had gone into it during those 8 months, to make the experience of everyone, including the players and readers the finest possible. The game-week started with one of our innovations to save the players from the hassle of looking up game details and starting an email thread (which also increases the speed of scheduling) - an automated email to the four players matched for a specific game were sent. It contained the names of the players, their seat number, and their timezone with UTC equivalent. This feature was well-received by the players, and the result was apparent. Every game was scheduled and their game taken up by a reader within 5 days of the start of the week, possibly a record for a mimir league.

Game-week 1 was hard, just like the game-week 1 (GW1) of season 1, but it was really fun and curiosity-tickling as was apparent from the rave review we received. But, no questions went unanswered in the first week.

Here are the quads and their creators:

Ancient volcanoes and archaeology | The Rumbling Island | Moon-landing conspiracies - Paul Pop

Woods in Minecraft | Theoretical physics in Ant-Man lore - Rutvik Mahajan

Science of Spices | The autism spectrum - Sanat Pai Raikar

Women in Astronomy | Tech originally funded by NASA - Surya Panchapakesan

Sphere packing - Eric Mukherjee

Science and tech in assorted music collection - Ramesh Athreya

Giants post non-avian dinosaurs - Ronak Gupta

Here is the Public Scoreboard where all the details are given.

In the game-week analyses of season 2, I will avoid discussing the contents of the quads, as they are best enjoyed by playing. That being said, I will mention any interesting tidbits. For example, I generally don’t allow quads that are very broad such as ‘Science and tech in assorted music collection’, but made an exemption since I felt that the audiovisual component was nice. As for 'The Rumbling Island’ quad, I had received the book for coming first in a quiz on lizards. So, its a virtuous cycle, where the fruits of a quiz had the seeds that germinated and gave rise to an interesting quad.

Introduced in the game-week 5 of season 1, we have a question every game-week that I have named the ‘Himalayan Quail’. The HiQ (pronounced as ‘Haikyu’) is a question whose answer is so elusive to even the strongest quizzers, that they will most likely go undiscovered. It may be something highly esoteric, or something so old that even if you’re a boomer, you will likely not remember. If you crack a HiQ, you will be featured on our website’s ‘Frame of Fame’ for an entire game-week (and whose tale of discovery will forever be etched in the documentation we maintain in our blogs).

Game-week 1’s HiQ was the question with the answer ‘White-tailed Tropicbird’. The least correct answer was the same as HiQ this game-week. It was answered by only Krishna Girish, unsurprisingly, as he is a fellow ornithologist. Unfortunately, we were too busy during the second-game week, we forgot to add the Frame of Fame for GW1. We will adjust this in GW2 ’s since no one cracked the HiQ for Game-week 2.

The most answered questions i.e, questions answered in all the games (26 games) were 9 in number. That means 18.75% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail.

The average number of unanswered questions per game (Total Xs per game) was 17.77. This is the second-highest in the past two seasons combined. The highest was in the finals of last season. This meant that we had to improve the grading. So, starting second game-week, we rounded up the difficulty levels for the average difficulty reported by our setters who participates in the play-testing, and then adjusted the questions accordingly. This is because our setters will themselves find the answers easier to get. There is a certain bias that is unavoidable there.

‘Tech originally funded by NASA’ was the toughest quad in GW1 with a 14.15% answer rate (answer rate = (corrects for the quad/total opportunities for the quad)*100, where opportunities = corrects+wrongs+passes). The most answered quad was 'Theoretical physics in Ant-Man lore', with a rate of 44.33% .

The maximum ADS and points by an individual for GW1 was scored by Pat Gibson - 11.87 and 18 respectively.

Here are the top ranking players of GW1 (ADS in brackets):

1. Pat Gibson (11.87)

2. Tilman Thiry (10.35)

3. George Scratcherd (9.33)

4. Aditya Gangrade (9.16)

5. Krishna Girish (9.09)

Players with the highest ADS and points, in their respective seats were:

Seat 1 | Pat Gibson | ADS = 11.87 | Points = 18

Seat 2 | George Scratcherd | ADS = 9.33 | Points = 14

Seat 3 | Tilman Thiry | ADS = 10.35 | Points = 16

Seat 4 | manoj saranathan | ADS = 8.16 | Points = 11

Congrats to these four for topping the charts.

On game-week 1, there seemed to a disadvantage for seat 4, that couldn’t attributed to chance alone. While seat 4 contained a lot of players who are new to the format, that alone didn’t explain the no. of Xs in seat 4. It was nearly consistently higher than all the seats. We have revisited our difficulty rating and question ordering strategy to avoid such an unintended disadvantage.

The themes that were represented the most this game-week, as a primary or secondary theme with 12 questions each were: history & literature, biology, physics, and wildlife.

Musketeers are those quads from which a player has answered all the questions, or the players themselves. Some leagues refers to the quads as muskets and the people scoring them as musketeers. It works either way. Musketeers will be rare since only one question per quad is direct to a person. During GW1, we had only muskeeter (Q is the primary quad relating to a theme):

10Q) Moon-landing conspiracies - Ashish Saligram

Congrats to Ashish for achieving such a commendable feat.

Themewise (T) and quad (Q) leaders for game-week 1, other than the one who already appear as a musketeer, are:

1) Physical Geography - Ancient volcanoes and archaeology (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Alexandra Hardwick, Akshay Gurumoorthi

2T) History and Literature (max = 5/12 (41.67%)) - Brandon Hensley, Hrishikesh Varma

2Q) The Rumbling Island (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Swaroop Ramaswamy, manoj saranathan, Aditya Gangrade, Pat Gibson, Wrichik Basu, Hrishikesh Varma, Swapnil Das, Ishaan Nejeeb, Rahul Jadhav, Saksham saini, Akshay Surendra, Ravi Mundoli, Maitrey Deshpande

3T) Biology (max = 6/12 (50%)) - Daniel K Lee, Pat Gibson, Suvajit Chakraborty

3Q) Woods in Minecraft (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Daniel K Lee, manoj saranathan, Pat Gibson, Tilman Thiry, Matt Prescott, Swapnil Das, Krishna Girish, Akshay Surendra, Movin Miranda, Amartya Dutt Ranga

4) Chemistry - Science of Spices (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Suvajit Chakraborty

5T) Physics (max = 6/12 (50%)) - Tilman Thiry

5Q) Women in Astronomy (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Brandon Hensley, George Scratcherd

6) Engineering & Technology - Tech originally funded by NASA (max = 2/4 (50%)) - John Liu, Anand Rao, Sarah Trevarthen, Hrishikesh Varma, Akshay Gurumoorthi, Subrat M, Aswath Venkataraman, Ishita Das, Dharani Govindasamy, Nandagopal K S, Sanveer Singh Puri

7) Mathematics - Sphere packing (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Daniel K Lee, George Scratcherd, Hrishikesh Varma, Francis Rodrigues, Subrat M, Rajagopal, Manjil Saikia, Maitrey Deshpande

8) Movies & TV - Theoretical physics in Ant-Man lore (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Sandeep Hari, Aswath Venkataraman, Kanak Varma

9) Music, Art and Architecture - Science and tech in assorted music collection (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Swaroop Ramaswamy, Anagha K H

10) Mythbusting - (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Ashish Saligram

11) Social Science & Psychology - The autism spectrum (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Brandon Hensley, Gaurav Sinha

12T) Wildlife (max = 7/12 (58.33%)) - Pat Gibson

12Q) Giants post non-avian dinosaurs (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Brandon Hensley, Pat Gibson, George Scratcherd, shashank, Movin Miranda, Ravi Mundoli, Shramanth, Salama Udaipurwala