[KLUG Members] GJ followup (was Meeting Notes)

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 10:20:19 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams <adam@morrison-ind.com> wrote:

>>>>That's true. One problem is that TV's Jeopardy scales geometrically, but
>>>>ours scales exponentially. For the one, if you answer all the questions
>>>>in a column and miss only the last, you get 1000. In ours you get -4.
>>>>That's a killer problem, and contributes to a lack of nerve.
>>> And I try to make the difficulty scale exponentially. :)
>>The greater the risk the greater the reward, but the chance of answering 
>>disappeared about half-way up the scale.  Movie release dates in Poland? 
>That one was a lemon question,  I don't even remember my rationale for it 
>being in there.
The thing to remeber about hescaling is thatwhile reward (and obscurity) may
go up expoentially, the point sare still only accumulated arithmetically. This
is the reason the Buce-Smithian strategy of cruising the top questions and 
not answering is so effective. It might be helpful to limit or discourage this
approach, since it leads to NO answering at all!

When the top point questions are "cruised" we have no feeling for how hard
things get with increased point value, we're simply doing a numbers play.
One of the nice things about Jeopardy is that running a category allows the
player to guage how much harder things are getting during the run.

>Cinema was the last category completed so I must have been really
>bleary.  Otherwise I thought the Cinema category was pretty good,
>a variety of people were able to answer questions.
It was generally good, but the example does favor a broader approach.

>The top point questions are supposed to be REALLY hard, since answering ONE
>would pretty much secure the game for the team.  The 256/512 pointers could 
>have been softened however.  But I also built for having some M$ types in
>the room, but apparently the're weren't any; which is OK, because they
>probably would have used the .Net catagory to smash the Linux oriented teams.
I felt there were some other examples of this as well.

>>  Despite the great entertainment in seeing Adam trying to read it (I 
>>thought Brian was going to have to administer a sedative or have him 
>>reconfigure an LDAP set up or something), it was way beyond my ken: I 
>>spent my time checking Peter for an ethernet jack in his neck or something.
>>Jon and I also got some other questions right too, like fonts and 
>>firewalls.  Even when we knew the answers we couldn't beat Peter to the 
>>button, but that didn't hurt our team.
>>I'm just glad we didn't have to undergo drug testing.  Is caffeine a 
>>banned substance?  Dr. Pepper?
We ought to retain a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude about chemicals, 
unlessthey areused by one team on another during the game. :)

>I'm thinking we need to install a metal detector and scan for implants.
Wow! TCS guards at the doors! What is all this regulation coming to?!? :)


							Regards,
							---> RGB <---