Analysis: Season 2, Game-week 2
- Paul Pop
Note: Before you start reading this game-week analysis, kindly have a look at our official policy on non-English answers.
Game-week 2 was a breeze compared to GW1, with a lot of high-scoring games. The questions were on the easier side, and there was no apparent disadvantage or advantage for any seat. As always, even though this is a themed quiz league, we still had an eclectic mix of topics. If you didn’t notice, we had cut down the number of medium-length quads (51-80 words) to 7 and replaced one of it with a small quad (30-50 words). This is because we found that the duration was longer than expected in GW1. So, now there are 3 small, 7 medium, 2 large quads (81-100 words). We may do more experiments with this based on the average time duration of the games in GW3.
On a related topic, we released the automated email sending feature for readers, which has made the life of readers and players even more easier. With this perfectly functioning addition, a player doesn’t even have to look at the Google sheets. All the information they need will arrive in their email. We are only in our second season, and we have already implemented a system that is so convenient to use. So, if you’re a player or a reader, please share about your user experience with others who may be interested in the league. We are a little disappointed by the number of participants for the second season. It is around the same as last season. We are looking for some growth.
Anyways, here are the quads and their creators:
Scientific instruments in Sean Connery's James Bond | Myths regarding birds in America | Calls of Asian Elephants - Paul Pop
Boron's lesser known uses | Probability distributions - Rutvik Mahajan
Randomised controlled trials | Psychometric tests - Sanat Pai Raikar
Biology in Through a Wormhole - Anupriya Dalmia
Quantum entanglement - Eric Mukherjee
Ramsar sites - Ramesh Athreya
Physics breakdown of famous paintings - Ronak Gupta
"It came to me in a dream” - Surya Panchapakesan
Here is the Public Scoreboard where all the details are given.
In GW2, unlike the first week, two questions went unanswered. One of the questions was contested by a player who is an expert in the field. The question was
"The episode 'Can We Live Forever?' in season 2 of the Morgan Freeman-narrated Through the Wormhole sheds a light on the science of ageing. Olaf Sporns coined the term “connectome” to describe a comprehensive map of all neural connections in the brain. What MRI technique did he use to define the human connectome?”
manoj saranathan who works with MRI and is “sort of making a connectome”, contested that the answer could also be functional MRI (fMRI) given the hints. So, I looked into it.
Statements one and two in the question are 100% correct (Reference 1; Reference 2). The question itself was based on what the person said during the documentary (see season 2 episode 9). Anupriya (who wrote the question) didn't refer to the original paper since Olaf himself was part of the documentary, and it is perfectly reasonable to trust what they are describing about their own research. I checked the original article and it indeed uses both functional and diffusion imaging ("Based on a combination of functional and diffusion-weighted imaging, we outline the following five-step strategy for compiling a first draft of the human connectome at the macroscale."). Apologies for this error.
As seen in the Public scoreboard (Week 2 Overview; Q.q = 8.4), nobody got the answer correct. So, it doesn't make any changes if we cancel this question or not (while the given answer is correct, if we accidentally omit another valid option, we may have to cancel it). Some other players have also answered fMRI, and we don't have the data for that. So, we can't change the scores now. This was the HiQ question of the game-week. But we are cancelling it as the HiQ, and making the next most difficult question the HiQ, which also went unanswered - the one with liquid rope coil effect as the answer.
The most answered questions increased by 1 to 10 this game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 29 games that happened). That means ~21% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail. The average number of unanswered questions/per game went down from 17.77 in GW1 to 15.77 in GW2.
Besides the unanswered questions, the least correct answer of GW2 were Palustrine, and needle of the lockstitch sewing machine, answered only twice each. The Mugger was an answer from GW1 whose scientific name Crocodylus palustris was a clue for the the first question. Congrats to Ravi Mundoli & manoj saranathan for answering correctly. It helps to remember the scientific names. Lockstich on the other hand was a kol-stylz/IYKYK (If you know, you know) type question. Congrats to Subrat M & Sanveer Singh Puri for cracking it.
In terms of quads, the toughest quad was the 'Physics breakdown of famous paintings' with an 18.24 % answer rate, a 4.09% increase in answer rate from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). This quad is a bit personal to Ronak as he studies soft matter physics and rheology, and the quad is somewhat related to it. That is the only reason why I allowed the answer ‘turbulence’, which has come in the first season, to be repeated again (but in a different context).
Speaking of quads, I must give a special thanks to Sanat for writing several quads under the theme ‘Social Sciences and Psychology’, including the two weeks’ because this is one theme I am often least inspired to write questions on.
In GW2, I was happy to see a feedback in our feedback forms that expressed how a player had found the questions very interesting, even though they had no idea what it is about. They cited a specific example i.e. of elcometer in my James Bond quad. This is the effect that I am hoping for all the participants in EMU. You should ideally end up getting curious about the questions and their answers, even if you don’t have any idea about anything being discussed.
The most answered quad was the 'Probability distributions' by Rutvik. It had an answer % of 42.31, a 2.76% decrease from the easiest quad of first week. Unlike the first season, we are not seeing large scores like 34 or 28 in the first two game-weeks as a result of two people not turning up, because all games had 4 or 3 players thanks to our initial vetting of players’ time commitment to the league during the registrations.
The maximum ADS and points by an individual for GW2 was scored by Pravar - 10.32 and 17 respectively.
Here are the top ranking players of GW2 (ADS in brackets):
Pravar (10.32)
Pat Gibson (9.49)
Rajagopal (8.39)
Saksham saini (8.02)
Jyothishraj N (7.89)
Players with the highest ADS and points, in their respective seats were:
Seat 1 | Alexandra Hardwick | ADS = 7.3475 | Points = 14
Seat 2 | Pravar | ADS = 10.32 | Points = 17
Seat 3 | Rajagopal | ADS = 8.39 | Points = 14
Seat 4 | Jyothishraj N | ADS = 7.89 | Points = 13
Congrats to these four for topping the charts.
We didn’t have any players cracking all four questions in a quad i.e. no musketeers in GW2. Musketeers will be rare since only one question per quad is direct to a person.
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 - Ramsar sites (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Ravi Mundoli, Subrat M, Akshay Surendra, Pat Gibson, Alexandra Hardwick, manoj saranathan, Gowtham Ravikumar, Venky Srinivasan, Sushant, Zubaer M
2) History and Literature - "It came to me in a dream" (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Krishna Girish, Subrat M, Suvajit Chakraborty, Saksham saini, Shreya Singh, Aditya Pujari, Sandeep Hari
3T) Biology (max = 7/12 (58.33%)) - Pravar
3Q) Randomised controlled trials (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Pravar
4) Chemistry - Boron's lesser known uses (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Alexandra Hardwick, Wesley Morgan, Forrest Weintraub, Dibyesh Kumar Hota
5T) Physics (max = 5/8 (62.5%)) - Akshat Jain
5Q) Quantum entanglement (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Jyothishraj N
6) Engineering & Technology - Scientific instruments in Sean Connery's James Bond (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Krishna Girish, shashank, Saksham saini, Pat Gibson, Forrest Weintraub, Jyothishraj N, Suresh Vishnu, Amartya Dutt Ranga, Venky Srinivasan, Sushant, Pravar, Aditya Sankaran, Hari Parameswaran,
7) Mathematics - Probability distributions (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Rahul Jadhav, Dharani Govindasamy, Jyothishraj N
8T) Movies & TV (max = 4/8 (50%)) - Krishna Girish, Saksham saini, Pat Gibson, Pravar
8Q) Biology in Through a Wormhole (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Krishna Girish, Gaurav Sinha, Saksham saini, Pat Gibson, Srinath Krishnamurthy, Brandon Hensley, S.Narayani, Nandagopal K S, Oswin Joseph, Yamini Guduru, Pravar, Donald Anderson
9) Music, Art and Architecture - Physics breakdown of famous paintings (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Akshat Jain
10) Mythbusting - Myths regarding birds in America (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Aswath Venkataraman, Carlo John Aiello
11) Social Science & Psychology - Psychometric tests (max = 3/4 (75%)) - S.Narayani
12T) Wildlife (max = 5/8 (62.5%)) - Pravar
12Q) Calls of Asian Elephant (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Ashish Saligram