Analysis: Season 2, Game-week 3

- Paul Pop

I am contemplating on whether to get rid of game-week analyses altogether since it costs me additional time that I don’t have every game-week. But, not writing the GW analyses gives me a feeling of incompleteness. As a fan of statistics, I do enjoy writing these (and a few people have informed me that they do enjoy reading these). So, I guess I will continue doing this, even if there are delays of 2-3 weeks.

Game-week 3 ran from 12th to 19th August 2024. We dipped our toes in the oceans and rivers this week, and attempted to travel to space with hardy organisms like tardigrades and Arabidopsis thaliana.

Here are the quads and their creators:

Sea Legs | Sulphur cycle | Biodiversity monitoring technologies | Wildlife in Poacher | Soy myths | Evolution of language - Paul Pop

Travelling waves | Biomimicry in architecture - Rutvik Mahajan

Tardigrades | Eponymous transform functions - Surya Panchapakesan

Rivers of Western Ghats | Birds-of-paradise - Sanat Pai Raikar

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

The ‘Birds-of-paradise’ quad was not made by me (although I edited the videos for it), which may come off as a surprise since I make all the ornithological quads. Sanat beat me to it this week, and made a wonderful quad. This quad, and the ‘Biomimicry in architecture’ by Rutvik were the most liked quads based on a poll (with 6 votes each), followed by Tardigrades by Surya (n = 4). They were all thoroughly enjoyable, packed with TILs.

Players who participated in the first season may recall that we had a quad on carbon cycle, and this season I made one on the sulphur cycle. So guess what biogeochemical cycle I am going to make one quad on for the next season? Hint: I used the “Global Warming: The Hard Science” by L. D. Danny Harvey as a starting point for both these quads. I am very proud of this book as I got it by coming first in a national level quiz on climate change (along with a partner) in IISc. I seem to have a good collection of books I have received from just quizzes, which helps in creating well-sourced quads.

In GW3, the number of unanswered questions rose from 2 to 3. This included the answers i) omidirectional, ii) Spookfish/Barreleye/Barreleyed fish/Opisthoproctidae, and iii) Six filaments. While the first two were marked as level 4s, surprisingly the last is a question that was deemed as level 2 in the beginning of the game-week. People didn’t seem to know much about the Birds-of-paradise (which makes me sad), with zero correct answers for one, and only two corrects for other two questions in the quad. The HiQ question was not among them. It was the one with Hystrix as the answer. This was answered by Suvajit Chakraborty. Congrats to him for getting an extremely difficult answer correct!

The most answered questions decreased from 10 to 6 this game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 26 games that happened). That means 12.5% 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 15.77 in GW1 to 20.77 in GW3.

Besides the unanswered questions and the HiQ, the least correct answer of GW3 were Burrows-Wheeler transform and isoflavone, answered only once each. Krishna Girish knows his eponymous transform functions very well, and got the first right. Ajit Nayak used his in-depth knowledge about soy, and cracked the latter. Congrats to both of them.

In terms of quads, the toughest quad was 'Birds-of-paradise' with the lowest answer rate in EMU history at 7.12 %, a 11.12% decrease in answer rate from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). The next lowest in the League history was also an ornithological quad ‘Bird homes (nests)’ from the finals of last season with an answer rate of 7.21%.

While it featured an unanswered question, the most answered quad was the 'Travelling waves' by Rutvik (his quads have been the most answered quad for three straight weeks). It had an answer % of 43.75, a 1.44% increase from the easiest quad of second week.

The maximum ADS and points by an individual for GW3 was scored by Krishna Girish - 13.35 and 17 respectively.

Here are the top ranking players of GW3 (ADS in brackets):

1. Krishna Girish (13.35)

2. Sreeram Madhavan V (7.77)

3. Forrest Weintraub (7.43)

4. Suvajit Chakraborty (7.25)

5. Pat Gibson (6.99)

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

Seat 1 | Sreeram Madhavan V | ADS = 7.77 | Points = 13

Seat 2 | Forrest Weintraub | ADS = 7.43 | Points = 12

Seat 3 | Ajit Nayak | ADS = 6.5 | Points = 10

Seat 4 | Krishna Girish | ADS = 13.35 | Points = 17

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 3, other than the ones which already appear as musketeers, are:

1) Physical Geography - Rivers of Western Ghats (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Ajit Nayak, Rahul Jadhav, Ananth Kachroo, Dibyesh Kumar Hota, Swagat Subhakanta Das

2) History and Literature - Sea Legs (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Rajagopal, Akshay Surendra, Alexandra Hardwick, Brandon Hensley, Daniel K Lee, Ajit Nayak, S.Narayani, Matt Prescott, John Liu, Hari Parameswaran

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

3Q) Tardigrades (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Nandagopal K S

4) Chemistry - Sulphur cycle (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Forrest Weintraub, Ashish Saligram, Nandagopal K S

5) Physics - Travelling waves (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Anagha K H

6) Engineering & Technology - Biodiversity monitoring technologies (max = 3/4 (75%)) - S.Narayani

7) Mathematics - Eponymous transform functions (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Krishna Girish

8) Movies & TV - Wildlife in Poacher (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Suvajit Chakraborty

9) Music, Art and Architecture - Biomimicry in architecture (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Krishna Girish, Jyothishraj N, Tilman Thiry, Daniel K Lee, Gowtham Ravikumar, Rahul Jadhav, Shramanth, Mukunth Raghavan

10) Mythbusting - Soy myths (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Subrat M, Pravar, Tilman Thiry, Brandon Hensley, Forrest Weintraub, Aditya Gangrade, Ajit Nayak, Shreya Singh, Srinath Krishnamurthy, Salama Udaipurwala, Nandagopal K S, Mukunth Raghavan

11) Social Science & Psychology - Evolution of language (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Rehmat Singh Chawla, Tore Dahl

12T) Wildlife (max = 4/8 (50%)) - Suvajit Chakraborty

12Q) Birds-of-paradise (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Krishna Girish, Swagat Subhakanta Das