Mahaquizzer 2007
Yesterday, I won the Pune section of the Mahaquizzer quiz, organised by the KQA. I scored 50 points out of 150. A preliminary set of results is available here. The overall winner hasn't been announced yet - I have a couple of guesses who it might be - we'll find out later this week. There are some really big guns who might have won.
I had a better outing this year compared to last time (41), where I made quite a few bad errors. The contest is written, and solving 150 questions in 90 minutes isn't all that easy. You hardly get to read most of the questions properly more than once, so it's useful if your internal IR engine is well oiled, in addition to its database size. I had a better go this time, my second attempt, managing to read more patiently than before. The setters tend to ask a lot of questions on science, geography, and physical world, which are not topics that I'm great at. Which means you try to maximise every chance you get, making my 3 silly mistakes all the more galling - I could easily have hit 52 or 53. I completely forgot to fill in one answer on the first page assuming I had filled it in. I also wrote the wrong first name of a scientist when I should have left just the surname in. I then completed this list of aargh-moments by contriving to trip myself over the names of a creator-character pair by not paying proper attention to the wording - I cancelled the answer out. There's a dull pain somewhere as residue.
The win would have been better had we also seen the participation of the two best quizzers in these parts in the last couple of years - Kunal S and Shamanth. We saw a total of 28 people participate from Pune, which was slightly disappointing for me. I had hoped we would hit 30-35. A few of the regulars couldn't make it, though. Worse was the turnout from school kids - was hoping there would be a lot more.
Anyway, back to this year's edition. I'm warming up to this contest, mainly for two reasons. One, quizzes by people outside your (sometimes incestuous) circle exposes you to other areas of interest. And secondly, since it's an all-India event, it's a decent way to see where you stand w.r.t. the others in the land. It's quite a tough job putting the quiz together and getting it out to different places, so congratulations to the KQA on this. Once again, many thanks to PSPL for the use of their gorgeous auditorium.
Update: The results are out here - Samanth S winning in style.