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BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | February 21, 2008

Swarthmore’s Quiz Bowl team is heading to St. Louis for the National Academic Quiz Tournament finals in April after winning the 2008 Mideast sectionals this month in Pittsburgh.

Quiz bBwl is a trivia game where a moderator reads questions to two teams, usually made up of four players each, and players compete to buzz in first with the correct answer to win points for their team.

Two types of questions are asked: tossup and bonus questions. Any individual player answers tossup questions, whereas the team answers bonus questions after a tossup question is answered correctly, according to the NAQT web site.

The questions cover academic subject areas representative of a liberal arts college education, such as literature, history, science, fine arts and philosophy.

“To be good at Quiz Bowl, it helps to have a good memory, especially for useless stuff,” Scott Shearousse ‘10, a member of this year’s team, said. “You have to be interested in a wide range of things.”

At a recent practice, questions covered topics from ancient capitals to string theory to ESPN’s forays into reality TV, all within one round of play. “The biggest subject areas are usually science and literature,” Josh Sokol ’11, a team member, said.

Sokol is responsible for the revitalization of the team this year.

“The team’s been around a long time, but it went defunct last year,” Sokol said. The college’s previous quiz bowl team had national success, winning the undergraduate championship in 1998, but stopped competing last year.

“I played in high school, and I really missed it and wanted to do it here too,” Sokol said. Sokol recruited people with previous experience on a Quiz Bowl team and used the sign up list from last year’s activity fair to contact students about the team’s reincarnation.

Although none of the members from the previous team were interested in participating, Sokol found enough interest from freshman and sophomores to create a new team.

“I did Quiz bBwl back in high school, but it was definitely not as important as it is here,” Alexander Warso ‘11 said. "It’s a lot of fun. You get to see what you know, and it makes you appreciate the random applications of what you learn."

This year, the team has participated in tournaments at Princeton and University of Pennsylvania, as well as the sectionals in Pittsburg, where they went 12-0 and won their division.

Because the team is young and still inexperienced, it is eligible for Division II, in which they can compete against other young teams of equal caliber, according to Sokol.

Many larger institutions have teams with more resources, including graduate students who still continue to be active members. As opposed to underclassmen, these graduate students have had several more years of learning and experience in the Quiz Bowl competition.

“The harder areas are usually social philosophers and international literature,” Sokol said. “We just don’t have experience with those because we are only freshman and sophomores and haven’t had enough time to learn about them yet.”

The tournament in Pittsburgh and the upcoming finals in St. Louis are both NAQT style tournaments, which the team prefers, according to Sokol.

“Right now the majority of the team prefers NAQT because the questions are shorter and it is a little easier,” Sokol said.

The team is funded by the college in order to pay for the transportation needed to get to these tournaments.

“We initially got funding from the Dean’s office,” Sokol said. “This semester we submitted to [the Student Budget Committee] our initial budget request.”

Part of this money was used to buy a set of buzzers for the team and part goes toward buying questions for the team to practice with, according to Sokol. Teams with more experience are expected to write their own questions for the tournaments, something Sokol hopes the Swarthmore team will be able to do in the future.

For now, Sokol’s goal for the team is to place in the top five at the upcoming tournament.

In future years, he hopes to expand the team by advertising at next year’s activity fair to let students know that the team is competing again.

The team right now has about 12 players, enough to make two teams that compete at each tournament, according to Sokol.

“I’m just doing this for fun,” Shearouse said. “And I hope to continue to play next year.”

Test your wit with these sample questions from Penn Bowl XVII

1. Switching between the two types of it occurs in expanded porphyrin analogues and molecules with an odd number of twisted carbon bonds possess the type of this property named for Mobius. It is characterized by negative values in the NICS method, and in NMR, de-shielding in molecules with this property is known as its namesake ring current. Furan and naphthalene are examples of electron-delocalized compounds with this property, which is generally seen in compounds that are planar, cyclic, and conjugated. For 10 points, name this property also found in compounds that have 4n + 2 pi electrons and obey Huckel’s rule.

ANSWER: aromatic [or aromaticity]

2. For a few days, this man was known as Salah Eddine Ammed, during a fake conversion to Islam which enabled him to scam two million dollars out of the Libyan government. This man appointed the first female prime minister in his region, Elisabeth Domitien, before Operation Barracuda ended his reign. He spent two hundred million dollars to re-enact the coronation of Napoleon and later responded harshly to a protest over school uniforms, killing one hundred students. For 10 points, name this man who overthrew David Dacko, proclaimed the Central African Empire, and was allegedly a cannibal.

ANSWER: Jean-Bedel Bokassa I

3. Its namesake arithmetic is restricted in Cyclone, which allows only the fat type. Its namesake type of swizzling is performed when it is brought into the main memory from external storage. In Fortran-90, it can be used to encapsulate the lower and upper bounds of array dimensions and the XOR operation can be performed on it during a memory shortage when using linked lists. The smart type is used for exception safety and garbage collection but the dangling type can leads to unpredictable behavior such as segmentation faults. For 10 points, name this data type that must be de-referenced in order to give the location of something stored.

ANSWER: pointers (prompt on reference)

4. During the Acacian Schism, emperor Anastasius I accussed Pope Symmachus of subscribing to this religion. Its founder wrote the Kephalaia, which identified that man with the “Paraclete” from the Book of John. That son of Patek was visited by an angel called “The Twin” before being martyred in the Passion of the Illuminator. According to this doctrine, those who eat meat, have sex, or own property are doomed to continue the entwining of spirit and matter. It inspired such Christian heresies as the Paulicians and Bogomils. For 10 points, name this eponymous religion which grew out of third-century Iran.

ANSWER: Manichaeism [accept any word forms that involve Mani]

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