Game-week 7 ran from 12th to 18th September 2024. In this game-week, we did some island-hopping to see some well-hidden rails (the biological kind, not the mechanical ones), browsed through some British Medical Journal Christmas issue articles, played with some electrical circuit components, travelled into the past to learn about Napoleon and associated innovators’ scientific side, and looked at some cool snakes pretending to be cobras.
This game-week, despite being the semi-finals, was relatively easy. As one player remarked, the difficulty of the game-weeks moves from easy to hard and then to easy. Something like an ECG. Since the semi-final stage was rather easy, the finals was going to be quite hard (finals are generally harder than any other game-week).
Since this is the penultimate game-week, before moving to the main part of this analysis, let’s look at the overall ADS rankings and who had the highest weekly ADS and points so far.
Overall ADS rankings (top 10):
Krishna Girish - 63.4
Pat Gibson - 60.67
manoj saranathan - 52.06
Tilman Thiry - 51.15
Subrat M - 47.7525
Aditya Gangrade - 47.09
Brandon Hensley - 45.7575
Forrest Weintraub - 44.76
Wrichik Basu - 44.095
Rajagopal - 42.64
It is clear from the list that either Krishna or Pat will end up in the first position at the end of the season, with very little distance between them. So, the finals will be a very exciting match. As for the third position, manoj or Tilman are the likely to secure it, once again, with very little distance between them. However, Subrat and Aditya also have a good chance at the third position. Will history repeat and will Pat and manoj become 2 and 3 respectively, like last season? We will find out at the end of the GW8. There is a good chance for surprises this season!
Let’s look at the weekly chart toppers in terms of ADS (in brackets):
GW1: Pat Gibson (11.87)
GW2: Pravar (10.32)
GW3: Krishna Girish (13.35)
GW4: Pat Gibson (11.31)
GW5: Krishna Girish (11.4)
GW6: Achyuth Sanjay (9.23)
GW7: Achyuth Sanjay (8.7375)
Only four players have topped the charts, and Achyuth, Krishna, and Pat did it twice! Krishna has had the highest weekly ADS so far, at 13.35 in GW3. Eric Mukherjee still holds the record for the highest weekly ADS of 14.18, which most likely won’t be exceeded as the circumstances leading to such high scores have been removed due to more emphasis on having all four players present for a game, and a slight increase in the overall difficulty level of the league.
Weekly chart toppers in terms of points (in brackets):
GW1: Pat Gibson (18)
GW2: Pravar (17)
GW3: Krishna Girish (17)
GW4: Achyuth Sanjay (20)
GW5: Krishna Girish (17)
GW6: Suresh Vishnu (16)
GW7: Hari Parameswaran (19)
Six players have topped the charts, with Krishna doing it twice! The highest weekly points was 20, obtained by Achyuth. This is in strong contrast to the record of 34 in season 1 by Eric Mukherjee, and it likely won’t happen again due to the above-mentioned reasons.
Now let’s get back to the GW analysis for GW7.
Here are the quads and their creators:
Island Rails | Animal Sentience | Learning math through visualisations | Bats in Hans Zimmer's Batman Begins soundtrack | Government-funded pseudoscience in India | Thanatology - Paul Pop
This week, Sanat’s “Cobras but not cobras” was liked by the most number of players (or readers) (5 votes). This was followed by Surya’s “British Medical Journal Christmas issue articles” and my “Government-funded pseudoscience in India” (4 votes each). Rutvik’s “Wave-particle duality” had 3 votes, and many other quads 1 or 2 votes each. BMJ Christmas issue articles was a very fascinating potpourri of questions. Surya has made several such informative quads this season, Tardigrades being one of them.
Some interesting things about the questions in GW7: I was able to sneak in two Batman Begins quads this season - one on technology in Batman Begins (last game-week), and another one this game-week on the music soundtrack which is one of the reasons why this movie is so amazing. Hans Zimmer, my favourite music artist has created the most iconic Batman soundtrack for Batman Begins, and as a cherry on top, named all of the tracks after bat genera, which I was able to use to make this quad.
My personal favourite quad this week however is ‘Island Rails’ since I was able to use Google Earth to creating a virtual birdwatching-travel experience. I am thinking of creating an entire set based on such island or location-hopping. Maybe an ornithological quiz-version of a treasure hunt. I had this in my mind for a long time. This might materialise as a fun standalone quiz sometime in the future for the ornithologically-inclined. Speaking of favourites, I was able to create a quad on probably my favourite journal - Animal Sentience. It’s a subject that is of great importance to how I perceive and interact with the world. One of the longest-running pseudoscience still endorsed by many scientists is the denial of sentience for non-human animals (to use and abuse them).
Due to a happy coincidence (?), two of the answers from this game-week from Rutvik’s “Fancy organic compounds” were also answers to the Zephyr Quiz League set of the game-week which began close to the end of ours (Rutvik is not a setter for ZQL). So, people who played the EMU game had a slight advantage, and were probably able to quickly answer “Olympicene” and “Penguinone”. Rutvik had also set another quad on organic compounds - “Aromatic organic compounds”, showing his fascination for organic chemistry. After me, Rutvik has set the most number of quads this season. And he has forayed beyond his comfort zone of physics quite a bit (although he has framed the maximum number of physics quads this season - 3 in total + other quads with physics as a secondary theme).
The following is an example of a EMUverse wormhole to the last season. This week featured Sanat’s quad ‘Cobras but not cobras’ (I had accidentally added it to the analysis of game-week 6) This is relevant to the following question which appears in my ‘Reptiles in James Bond movies’ quad from last season (GW3):
Q: In the movie Octopussy (1983), Bond's contact in India is a man pretending to be a snake charmer, played (ironically) by the ophidiophobic Vijay Amrithraj who says "This was the wrong cover. I hate snakes" while moving a snake back into a bin. A different species of this group of snakes, appears in the Casino Royale (2006) as a staged fight with a mongoose. All known species of this group, mostly in the family Elapidae, are venomous and many are capable of rearing upwards and producing a hood when threatened. Which group is this?
A: Cobra (accept Naja too). Anti-prompt on King Cobra, Monocled Cobra etc. Cobra fall under several genera, but most under the genus Naja. Naja would fetch points since the one in Octopussy is most likely Naja naja (the Indian Cobra) [Ophidophobes beware - snake images below]
and the one in Casino Royale is Naja annulifera (Snouted Cobra/Banded Egyptian Cobra).
The quad from this week throws some light on the difference between ‘true cobras’ and ‘not true cobras’, which was not mentioned in the question from last season. So, it helped in expanding the knowledge we had on the subject. That makes for a very nice quad.
Like GW6, there was one unanswered question this game-week, which was the same as the HiQ question. The HiQ question was the one with Uropatagium/Interfemoral membrane as the answer. Batman quad strikes again! The question was:
Batman Begins soundtrack's 5th track is Artibeus. The best studied of this genus is Artibeus jamaicensis - the Jamaican Fruit Bat. Their distinctive features include the absence of an external tail and a minimal, U-shaped BLANK. What is BLANK - the skin that stretches between an animal's hind-limbs?
Image: Karin Schneeberger CC BY-SA 3.0
Besides the HiQ, the other least correct answers of GW7 were Function Generator and American Cobra or North American Coral/Eastern Coral/Common Coral/Harlequin Coral Snake. Only three people each got these right. The former was answered by Tilman Thiry, Movin Miranda, and Kanak Varma. The latter was answered by Krishna Girish, Maitrey Deshpande, and Shubham Jha. Congrats to all of them for cracking some of the hardest questions of the sets.
The most answered questions were 10 this game-week (i.e. answered in every one of the 26 games played). That means ~20.8% of the questions in the set were answered in every single game without fail. The average number of unanswered questions/per game decreased from 20.58 in GW6 to 14.62 in GW7.
In terms of quads, the toughest quad was 'Napolean and associated innovators’ with an answer rate of 18.18%, a 7.13% increase from last week's toughest quad (corrects/opportunities). The most answered quad was 'Learning math through visualisations'. It had an answer % of 46.35, a 7.46% increase from the easiest quad of the sixth week.
There was a somewhat high biology bias in GW7 with four quads having Biology as primary or secondary themes, followed by Wildlife (3 quads), and then by History & Literature, and Physics (2 two quads each).
The maximum ADS by an individual for GW7 was scored once again by Achyuth Sanjay - 8.7375 (got the highest ADS two weeks in a row).
Here are the other top ranking players of GW7 (ADS in brackets):
Ishaan Nejeeb (8.6575)
Subrat M (8.63)
Hari Parameswaran (8.4025)
Tilman Thiry (7.86)
Players with the highest ADS, in their respective seats were (and their corresponding points):
7) Mathematics - Learning math through visualisations (max = 3/4 (75%)) - Sreeram Madhavan V, Hari Parameswaran, Mukunth Raghavan
8) Movies & TV - British Medical Journal Christmas issue articles (max = 3/4 (75%)) - George Scratcherd, Shreya Singh, Salama Udaipurwala, Yamini Guduru, Diptojyoti Das Purkayastha
9) Music, Art and Architecture - Bats in Hans Zimmer's Batman Begins soundtrack (max = 2/4 (50%)) - Tilman Thiry, Jyothishraj N, Sarah Trevarthen, Anand Rao, Aswath Venkataraman, Gowtham Ravikumar, Erwin Fortuin, Suresh Vishnu, Zubaer M, Abhijith Bhadran, Mukunth Raghavan
