New Scaratings

When the monkeys ask a question about somebody like Odd Nerdrum, we can shrug and say that was intended to be a roulette question. Of course that just means that only the borg teams can be assured of answering it, so we assume that the monkeys want the borgs to win. But when the question concerns the periodic table, we assume that the answer will at least be correct. Boron is a nonmetal and is associated with a number of other nonmetals, including arsenic. But if the questioner wants us to answer that boron is associated with aluminum, a metal, he or she demonstrates ignorance, and that is too bad--and possibly one reason why the number of players has declined from about 10,000 to about 7,000. New and better monkeys needed, Buzztime!
XT

The question asked for an element in the Boron group. Aluminum is in the Boron group as is Gallium, Indium, and Thallium, also all metals.

Our chemist read the question, answered Aluminum and went back to sleep.

BO

As BO pointed out, the question was:

THE BORON GROUP OF
ELEMENTS INCLUDES:

The monkeys insist the question is correct as written.

So do the flightless waterfowl

_________________
/°v°\ • Every time Linux boots, a penguin gets its wings
I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I won't stop until I find out what
Why not downgrade Plutonium to a dwarf element?

I would agree that questions such as the one about the oddly controversial Norwegian painter certainly tilt the playing field in favor of the borgs, since pretty much everybody else is going to be guessing blindly what the answer might be. Sometimes these people have been in the news recently, which I guess would favor the NPR listener or NY Times reader, but this particular individual doesn't seem to have done anything except get himself incarcerated for tax evasion - breaking news of which I sincerely doubt anyone outside Norway, or the modern art world, would be aware.

I also believe that questions like last night's Final Strategy should be removed from the repertoire. A Russian Nobel laureate from the mid-1950s? Really? Who, aside from someone with an eidetic memory who had browsed through the list of winners, would possibly have a chance at knowing this one?

Well, as it happens, I had a rather unusual advantage with this question, in that my grandfather's first cousin was the guy's co-laureate that year. Even so, it still took me a couple of seconds to realize why I knew the answer.

That doesn't alter the fact that these Nobel questions are usually pure crapshoots and need to disappear.

Actually, I was kind of surprised at how poorly the borg teams performed last night. Only one (to my knowledge) in the top ten, and others well down in the pack. Congrats to the content team for the (obviously) challenging game that apparently was borg-resistant.

A few years ago, it seemed that Nobel laureate questions showed up at least every other week. While (unlike DINGO), I grudgingly have to acknowledge that such questions are fair game for Showdown, I think that their less-prolific appearance of late is better for the game, for the reasons DINGO gives.

If they do continue to appear, I would humbly suggest making them more challenging for the borg by not giving the name in the question, but rather the work for which they were inducted. This would be harder to look up on a computer quickly (except for Literature). The same goes for most questions in Pyramid and Final Strategy.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

I was surprised at the low scores overall, as we did a little better than average, although still making just under 40 000, and were astonished to find ourselves 26th. I thought that the Nobel question was fair; given its wording (something like 'the first Russian to win a Nobel Prize in a Science' and the choices, there were only two possible answers (Physiology
and Chemistry), unless one includes the recently added pseudo-science of Economics. There are no Nobel Prizes for the other two science options- biology and astronomy - and even Physiology is actually called Physiology and Medicine.

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Wayne Neily
Tremont, Kings Co., N. S.

"What mighty contests rise from trivial things!" - Alexander Pope, 1712.

"Beauty is truth, and truth beauty", John Keats, 1820.

Economics is not a pseudo-science! It's just a science where you never have to be right about anything, nothing you do needs to do repeatable, your models don't have to relate to reality, and you are always allowed to go back and "modify" your old statements. I consider it very akin to forum posting!

Just so I understand...
You are requesting that BT design a trivia game that does NOT favor those with the best memory and/or recall ability.
Interesting... I say we give it a try.
FYI, count your blessings that you're not a sports guy. "Lists" minutiae runs rampant in sports trivia. I love it, of course, but opinions vary.

I say just go all out and make it all "reasoning" questions.

Perhaps the final question can be a written exam.

Or simple arithmetic using Roman numerakls!

I'm not requesting anything. Just voicing an opinion about a certain type of question that, to my possibly erroneous judgment, strays over the line which divides the acceptably arcane from the ridiculously obscure. Notionally, there's a percentage here which defines the line, but I couldn't tell you what it is. But in broad terms I would say that in order for the game to be a fair test of knowledge and/or deductive skills, a pyramid round or final strategy question ought to be answerable with some certainty by at least 15% of the players in the game, with or without help from their teammates. I doubt that even 1% of players on Tuesday night had any idea who Semyenov was, and the overwhelming majority was forced to guess. Obviously some of the answer options could be discarded right away, but still it boiled down to a guessing game which favored teams with enough boxes in play to organize a split, teams which use computer help, and to a lesser extent teams who had the viable alternatives wiped out earlier than others. I don't think this is a satisfactory way to decide who wins the flagship game of Buzztime trivia.

I've played two, or possibly three sports trivia games in the last 15 years or so and I know what you're talking about there. But then sports, particularly in America, sort of revolve around statistics, so in a way I guess that the kind of rote memorization that helps in those games comes more naturally to sports aficionados. My own sports passions involve world soccer, cricket and formula 1 motor racing, but these are not so systematically quantified as American sports as far as I know, so my mindset is different.