Analysis: Season 2, Game-week 4
- Paul Pop
Game-week 4 ran from 19th to 26th August 2024. It was clearly easier than the GW3. In this game-week, we learnt of the usage of some insufferable musical puns for article titles (as well as some tolerable and based ones). We also took a virtual walk around Delhi to explore its tree diversity, and climbed four of the Volcanic Seven Summits.
Here are the quads and their creators:
Trees of Delhi | Animal crossing | Murder at the End of the World | Articles with music titles | Movie myths in Mythbusters - Paul Pop
Colligative properties of solutions | Weirdly-named mathematical theorems - Rutvik Mahajan
Plant-based nutrition - Ishan Rathore
Volcanic Seven Summits - Ramesh Athreya
Quasicrystals - Ronak Gupta
Phobias - Sanat Pai Raikar
Glass Animals - Surya Panchapakesan
Here is the Public Scoreboard where all the details are given.
This game-week, there was no space for a bird quad, so I got my weekly bird fix by talking about a study which found that a solution to prevent bird deaths in windmill farms, like that of the White-tailed Eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla), was to Paint it Black (“it” being one of the three rotor blades). This week, Rutvik’s quad “Weirdly-named mathematical theorems” was liked by an overwhelming number of players (8 votes). We seem to have a good number of math enthusiasts! This was followed by Sanat’s “phobias” quad (n = 3) and my “Movie myths in Mythbusting” quad (n = 2). Several other quads got a single vote (like last game-week), indicating those players’ more specialised and niche tastes.
Some interesting things about our questions in GW4: Nitrogen has come as an answer in the gaseous form in season 1 week 4 in the quad about food preservation (since nitrogen flushing is used to take out of oxygen from packaged foods to prevents its spoiling). This game-week, it came in the form ‘liquid nitrogen’, in the quad about Mythbusters. So, you now know what state of nitrogen is going to come in our next season. Move over MCU. We are creating multiverse of knowledge (which is actually what the ‘multiverse’ in EMU means). Speaking of season 1, the quad ‘Articles with music titles’ was loosely inspired by my earlier quad ‘Title of medical papers’ from S1-GW2, since both had looked at the wordplay involved in the titles of papers.
Another interesting thing from GW4 is the unintentional completion of a piece of trivia from one quad, by a question from different quad by a different setter. To illustrate, here is a question from Ishan’s quad:
BLANK1 is a BLANK2-containing protein which carries oxygen in the root nodules of soybean, alfalfa, and other nitrogen-fixing plants. Removing the first letters of BLANK1 will give you the protein which has essentially the same function in almost all vertebrates. In recent times, BLANK1 have been used to give a meaty umami flavour to plant based meats. The use of this substance was pioneered by the company Impossible Foods. Name the protein BLANK1.
The answer is leghaemoglobin. See the part I highlighted here - “almost all vertebrates”? Surprisingly, this piece of trivia was completed by one of Surya’s questions:
The Channichthyidae (Pr: Chan-itch-thiyidae) family, found in very cold waters, are the only known vertebrates to lack haemoglobin as adults. They survive without it since cold water has a high level of dissolved oxygen. Their larger heart and blood vessels also help. Whalers called them BLANK1 BLANK2, owing to the jaw shape and their transparency, and part of their name is also that of a major antagonist in the animanga series One Piece. FITB or give any of their other names.
The answer is Crocodile Icefish/Antarctic Icefish/White-blooded Icefish. So, this question supplements the first and completes a piece of trivia (the exception) many of you would have been fascinated to learn about. A multiverse of ‘add’ness. Talk about happy coincidences!
And we certainly seem to have a bias for volcanoes. We had three quads on volcanoes in EMU so far - ‘Volcanoes in paintings’ in season 1, and two this season - ‘Ancient volcanoes and archaeology’ and ‘Volcanic Seven Summits’. The might of volcanoes really fascinates us all (I made two of these, so I guess I shouldn’t generalise).
In GW4, unlike GW2 and GW3, there were zero unanswered questions (like the first game-week). The HiQ question was the one with cyathium (plural: cyathia) as the answer. This is a complex structure specific to certain euphorbias, where one extremely reduced female flower is flanked by 5 groups of extremely reduced male flowers. Only person answered it - a student of botany - Amartya Dutt Ranga. Congrats to him for getting an extremely difficult answer correct!
Besides the HiQ, the other least correct answer of GW4 was Crocodile Icefish, also answered only once. Congrats to Ajit Nayak who created a streak by getting this right (he cracked one least answered question in GW3 as well).
The most answered questions made a high jump from 6 to 14 this game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 26 games)! That means ~29.2% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail. The average number of unanswered questions/per game down from 20.77 in GW3 to 16.38 in GW4.
In terms of quads, the toughest quad was 'Glass Animals’ by Surya with an answer rate of 13.75 %, a 6.63% increase from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). The most answered quad was the 'Articles with music titles' which breaks Rutvik’s streak for creating the quad with the highest % answered every game-week. It had an answer % of 46.92, a 3.17% increase from the easiest quad of third week.
There was a slight biology bias in GW4 (like most weeks) with three quads having Biology as primary or secondary themes.
The maximum ADS and points by an individual for GW4 was scored by Pat Gibson - 11.31 and 16 respectively.
Here are the top ranking players of GW4 (ADS in brackets):
Pat Gibson (11.31)
Brandon Hensley (9.38)
Tilman Thiry (8.5)
manoj saranathan (7.98)
Aditya Gangrade (7.93)
Players with the highest ADS, in their respective seats were (and their corresponding points):
Seat 1 | Brandon Hensley | ADS = 9.38 | Points = 15
Seat 2 | Aditya Gangrade | ADS = 7.93 | Points = 14
Seat 3 | manoj saranathan | ADS = 7.98 | Points = 13
Seat 4 | Pat Gibson | ADS = 11.31 | Points = 16
Congrats to these four for topping the charts.
Musketeers will be rare since only one question per quad is direct to a person. After a drought of musketeers in GW2 and GW3, two muskets surfaced in GW4! We had these muskeeters (Q is the primary quad relating to a theme):
9Q) Articles with music titles - Swaroop Ramaswamy & Pam Douglas
10Q) Movie myths in Mythbusters - Kanak Varma
Congrats to these three players for achieving such a commendable feat.
Themewise (T) and quad (Q, primary quad relating to a theme) leaders for game-week 4, other than the ones which already appear as musketeers, are:
1) Physical Geography - Volcanic Seven Summits (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Daniel K Lee, Hrishikesh Varma
2) History and Literature - Trees of Delhi (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Aditya Gangrade, manoj saranathan, Pravar, Maitrey Deshpande, Akshat Jain, Zubaer M
3T) Biology (max = 5/12 (41.67%)) - manoj saranathan, Pravar, Achyuth Sanjay
3Q) Plant-based nutrition (max = 3/4 (75%)) - manoj saranathan
4) Chemistry - Colligative properties of solutions (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Brandon Hensley, Dibyesh Kumar Hota
5) Physics - Quasicrystals (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Aditya Gangrade, Tilman Thiry
6) Engineering & Technology - Animal crossing (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Krishna Girish, Aditya Pujari, Aditya Gangrade, Rahul Jadhav, Ravi Mundoli, Tilman Thiry, John Liu, Sarah Trevarthen, Wesley Morgan, Achyuth Sanjay
7) Mathematics - Weirdly-named mathematical theorems (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Jyothishraj N
8) Movies & TV - Murder at the End of the World (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Tilman Thiry
9) Music, Art and Architecture (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Swaroop Ramaswamy, Pam Douglas
10) Mythbusting (max = 4/4 (100%)) - Kanak Varma
11) Social Science & Psychology - Phobias (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Subrat M, Mukunth Raghavan, Harishkumar A
12) Wildlife - Glass Animals (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Akshay Surendra, Brandon Hensley, GG, Ishaan Nejeeb, Aditi Surendra, Pam Douglas, Achyuth Sanjay