Congrats to the finalists!

• Four rounds• Round 1: Clockwise, 12 Qs, infinite bounce+pounce

• Round 2: Tech in movies, 5 Qs, written

• Round 3: Anticlockwise, 12 Qs, infinite bounce, no pounce

• Round 4: LVC

Round 1Infinite Bounce + Pounce

+10 Direct

+10/-10 Pounce

1.

• Robert Alan Eustace is an American computer scientist who joined Google when it was a four year old company and worked as Senior Vice President of Engineering. He now serves as Senior Vice President of Knowledge and is slated to retire this year

• However, he is probably most well known for a feat he accomplished in 2014 (assisted by TIFR, Hyderabad), besting another man who shot to fame in 2012

• Who is the other man/ what accomplishment (either)

• Felix Baumgartner

2.The following image a snippet from the

source code of Emacs. ● The constant string so defined is a reference to a

quote made by whom?● Also, this snippet makes a jab at which prominent

developer of Emacs?

• Woody Guthrie

• Richard Stallman

3.

• Context free Grammar is basically a set of rules for computer generated mad libs. Each rule consists of a term along with a set of choice about about how to make the term. The choices can contain text, or other terms, or even refer recursively to the term being defined. For instance, the following grammar

• can produce nounphrases like “apple,” “enormous smelly mailman,” or “super super smelly chartreuse mailman.” The most natural thing to do with a CFG is exploit recursiveness as much as possible. The more recursion built in, the less predictable and richer the output.

● The text above and previous is sourced from a project page where the

author describes this method and uses it to create a software.

● What does software like this do?

● Creates fake academic papers

● SnarXiv produces fake paper in High Energy Physics and is similar to

the genrator SciGen which was used for publishing fake papers in

Computer Science

4. Connect

• Streisand Effect

5.

• It’s a common error to write if (i=2) instead of (i==2) when coding in several languages.

• A simple solution for this became a standard coding practice used in the Wordpress CMS source code.

• What is the solution called/What is the solution called?

• Writing if(2==i) rather than (i==2)

• (2=i) would return an error

• Called Yoda conditions

6.

• Twelve F-22 Raptors (among the most powerful and expensive fighter planes in the world), during their first international project, flying from Hickam AFB in Hawaii to Kadena AFB, Japan in February 2007, suddenly faced the aircraft equivalent of the blue screen of death, with the GPS having gone haywire and losing all control over the speed and altitude gauge. The problem was attributed to a software bug that overlooked something.

• What was overlooked?

• The international date line

• If you've ever flown internationally with a smartphone, you know that the sudden change in location can make it go crazy. Your GPS stops working, the clock gives you screwy results from all sorts of time zones, the radio gives you weird error codes. This was like that.

7.

• This house you see here is the Nigerian embassy in Prague. 10 years ago, it witnessed the killing of the Consul General, Michael LekaraWayid by an enraged Jiří Pasovský. Why was Pasovský angry?

• Pasovský had lost over $600,000 because of Nigerian 419 scammers and hence took all his anger at the Nigerian Consul General.

8.• Jordan Mechner borrowed the technique of rotoscoping that he had

learned about in his history of cinema class. He had his brother jump and traced his body shape and then digitalized it. What was this for?

• The jump in Prince of Persia

9.

• Light enters through the lens of the camera, and hits the rotating mirror shutter, which bounces the light to the horizontal ground glass. The beam splitter is directly over the ground glass and turns the light again 90 degrees, and projects it onto the chip of the other camera-through its own lens system. This is then displayed on a monitor.

• Which technology? It was developed by which comedian and director (famous for starring in The Nutty Professor) when he wanted to have the same view as the camera operator?

• Video Assist (or Video Tap)

• Jerry Lewis

10.

“Fuck off,” the reef said, vibrating Robbie’s hull through the slap-slap of the waves of the coral sea, where he’d plied his trade for decades. “Seriously. This is our patch, and you’re not welcome.”Robbie shipped oars and let the current rock him back toward the ship. He’d never met a sentient reef before, but he wasn’t surprised to see that Osprey Reef was the first to wake up. There’d been a lot of electromagnetic activity around there the last few times the big ship had steamed through the night to moor up here.• This is a story by the blogger Cory Doctorow. The name of the story is the

same as an article titled “I, X” that appeared on The Onion as a pun on Asimov’s I, Robot. The anthropomorphic X gives a speech parodying much of the angst experienced by the robots in Asimov’s creation.

• X?

• I, Rowboat

11.

• The last Chess World Championship under the PCA (Professional Chess Authority) was in 1995, when Gary Kasparov defeated Viswanathan Anand by four wins to one. The remaining 13 were draws

• Soon after, the PCA (which itself was established when Kasparov broke away from FIDE) collapsed because Intel withdrew its sponsorship to the agency

• What prompted Intel to withdraw?

• Kasparov’s match against IBM Deep Blue

12.

• In mid-1980s, Friedhelm Hillebrand the chairman of the Special Mobile Group at the European Telecommunications Standards Institut(ETSI) sat alone in his room in Germany and started typing random sentences. He did this for a long time and later analyzed the average length of sentences.

• What did Hillebrand find as the average length of sentences and how did he use this number?

• He found that the average length of his sentences was 160 characters

• Length of an SMS

Round 2: Tech in MoviesWritten Round

5 Questions

+10 for every correct answer

1.

• Requiring an unprecedented budget of more than $94 million, much of which was spent on filming and special effects, the film was released on July 3, 1991 in the US

• Publications such as the American Film Institute have since ranked it as one of the greatest action films, science fiction films and sequels of all time

• The visual effects saw saw breakthroughs in computer-generated imagery, including the first use of natural human motion for a computer-generated character and the first partially computer-generated main character

• An alternate ending released on some DVDs shows the protagonist in 2027 where he is now a senator, and has a daughter who is seen playing in a park

2.

• The Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet was a public bet on the outcome of the black hole information paradox made in 1997 by physics theorists Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking on the one side, and John Preskillon the other

• The movie – ‘The Theory of Everything’ however, shows a bet between Thorne and Hawking, with Hawking winning a year’s subscription to Penthouse when he eventually wins

• In the same year that the movie was released, Kip Thorne was in the news for other reasons.

• What was he in the news for?

3.

• It is said to have inspired the design of C3PO

• It has been given several names through the decades: Parody, Ultima, Machina, Futura, Robotrix, False Maria, and Hel

• It featured in the video clip of Queen's song Radio Ga Ga, in which Freddie Mercury's face was superimposed on the robot's face

• Blade Runner, which took heavy inspiration from the movie, has three female characters, all of whom are robots

• Which landmark movie?

Funda?

5.

• File System Visualiser is a UNIX clone of the File System Navigator, an application that allows for the viewing of a file system in 3d. Built using OpenGL, this represents files (and directories) as cuboids with height indicative of size.

• It became a little popular in 1993, when what is thought to be an ‘unrealistic Hollywood mockup’ turned out to have been inspired by FSV. What made FSV popular?

(image on next slide)

• Please exchange sheets

1.

• Requiring an unprecedented budget of more than $94 million, much of which was spent on filming and special effects, the film was released on July 3, 1991 in the US

• Publications such as the American Film Institute have since ranked it as one of the greatest action films, science fiction films and sequels of all time

• The visual effects saw saw breakthroughs in computer-generated imagery, including the first use of natural human motion for a computer-generated character and the first partially computer-generated main character

• An alternate ending released on some DVDs shows the protagonist in 2027 where he is now a senator, and has a daughter who is seen playing in a park

2.

• The Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet was a public bet on the outcome of the black hole information paradox made in 1997 by physics theorists Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking on the one side, and John Preskillon the other

• The movie – ‘The Theory of Everything’ however, shows a bet between Thorne and Hawking, with Hawking winning a year’s subscription to Penthouse when he eventually wins

• In the same year that the movie was released, Kip Thorne was in the news for other reasons.

• What was he in the news for?

• The black hole simulations for Interstellar

3.

• It is said to have inspired the design of C3PO

• It has been given several names through the decades: Parody, Ultima, Machina, Futura, Robotrix, False Maria, and Hel

• It featured in the video clip of Queen's song Radio Ga Ga, in which Freddie Mercury's face was superimposed on the robot's face

• Blade Runner, which took heavy inspiration from the movie, has three female characters, all of whom are robots

• Which landmark movie?

Funda?

5.

• File System Visualiser is a UNIX clone of the File System Navigator, an application that allows for the viewing of a file system in 3d. Built using OpenGL, this represents files (and directories) as cuboids with height indicative of size.

• It became a little popular in 1993, when what is thought to be an ‘unrealistic Hollywood mockup’ turned out to have been inspired by FSV. What made FSV popular?

Answer

• The “it’s a UNIX system” scene in Jurassic Park

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng

Round 312 Questions

Counter-clockwise

Infinite Bounce +10

No Pounce

1.

• This is a pretty unusual, but incomplete list. Think recent, and wacky. Have left out the most famous one.

Dead flowersFishFecal matter of various animalsCrustaceansScathing correspondence

• What is left out?

• Ship your enemies glitter

2.

• What’s been blanked out?

• How to look at your website

3.

• Vedanta Desika was challenged to write a thousand verses in one night. He not only aced the challenge with the paduka sahasram, he also hid a lot of gems in the work. Among them are these two shlokason Lord Ranganatha.

• The second sloka is in fact, an anagram of the first. When encoded with the standard Katapayadi mapping, the second sloka acts as a key to reveal a solution to a problem often discussed in introductory programming courses.

• What problem?

• The Euler Knight problem

4.

• Since 1989, the development of X has essentially been frozen, with only bug fixes released periodically

• X is a programming language in the sense that it supports the if-else construct: you can make calculations with it (that are performed while compiling the document), etc., but you would find it very hard to do anything but what it was designed for

• X is renowned for being extremely stable, for running on many different kinds of computers, and for being virtually bug free.

• The version numbers of X are converging toward Pi

5.

• This is from the Whitney Museum of American Art description of a work named Big Red. Where else has this work often been seen?

• “Alexander Calder’s mobiles occupy space not through volumetric form but through multiple planar shapes that branch out into space. For his mature, wind-driven mobiles, Calder sought the random movement induced by air currents, but controlled it through carefully calibrated systems of weights and balances. Large cut-metal mobiles such as Big Red spin slowly through 360 degrees, while subsidiary systems within the composition form their own independent kinetic arrangements.”

• The cover of Introduction to Algorithms

6.

• A crowdsourced website, it has over seven million pages and in the beginning of 2014, saw around 2000 entries being added everyday

• The founder paid more attention to the site after a news article revealed that United Kingdom (UK) high court judges had used it to assist them in a case involving two rappers

• In April of 2013, it was used in a financial restitution case in Wisconsin to reject the convicts claim that he should not have to compensate for the van he had stolen

• Reportedly, just under 40 percent of the site’s traffic is international, while the site's audience was predominantly male and aged between 15 and 24

7.

• It may have us stroking Donald Trump's hair and shouting "Swiffer Wetjet" at our televisions.

-GQ

• Viagra!-Several different sources

• It just seems downright nefarious. Why? Because I'd totally do it, and my soul would slowly die inside. I can't be the only one.

-Gizmodo

• "I’M LOVIN’ IT, I PROMISE I’M LOVIN’ IT! NOW GET ME BACK TO CSI MIAMI!“

-Anonymous

• Responses to what patent, filed by whom?

• Sony’s patent for skipping commercials by shouting ad content at your TV/Console

8.

• Launched in 2011, it was a Tor hidden service, where some had to buy an account in an auction

• The original was shut down, and a new one came up in 2013, which too was later shut down

• It was named after something started by the Han dynasty, and the pseudonym of the person who operated it is a fictional character from The Princess Bride

• This operator had roughly $87 million worth of bitcoins on his computer

• Name of the service?

9.

• During a war between Iran and Iraq in 1988 in which the US decided to get involved, the USS Vincennes shot down a civilian airliner thinking that it was a combat aircraft. The mistake is attributed to a poorly designed UI.

• What was the design?

• How did strategy games (more specifically, the cursers and clicking) inspire the new UI?

• The pilots had several different cursers, including one curser to track an object and a different curser to get more information (through radio signals). It was easy to forget what was being highlighted, like what happened here.

• It was solved by having one single curser to track and get information – an inspiration from war strategy games

10.

• X, which is in a completely different sphere of business, is arguably the biggest client of Amazon cloud services.

• In Silicon Valley, X has become best known for its so-called Simian Army, a facetiously named set of applications that test/automate/configure the resilience of cloud systems.

• Applications such as Chaos Monkey, Chaos Kong and Asgasrd have been used by eBay, Microsoft and even the Obama campaign for their cloud computing services.

• ID X

• Netflix

11.

• Countdown to Zero Day is a book written by Kim Zetter about ‘the first digital weapon’.

• A good part of the book is about an Iranian Uranium enrichment facility in Natanz and about the Programmable Logic Controllers (made by Siemens) the nuclear centrifuge used. What he describes as the weapon was used to greatly speed up the centrifuge so that it would eventually be destroyed while telling the computer that everything was all right.

• What was ‘the first digital weapon’?

Stuxnet

12.

• What change was brought about because of the following reasons?

• Computers those days had a very low resolution and it was pretty hard to draw it

• It involved more computation

• It was difficult to spot

• The mouse curser was tilted by 45 degrees

Final RoundLVC

+30/-15

+20/-10

+10/0

+30/-15

+20/-10

+10/0

Scores

The End.

12.

• A new character was introduced in Unicode 1.1.0 in June 1993 (among many others, obviously). Encoding table below.

• The character stems from a major Dravidian language but despite its origin, it is most commonly used outside of India

• According to sources, it was first used as part of something on 2channel- a popular Japanese imageboard site and later became popular on 4chan and subsequently, other websites

• Example of a usage:• Speaker 1: I have just purchased a Yoko Ono CD

Speaker 2: ಠ_ಠ• What has been blanked out/which character?

Look of disapproval

ಠ_ಠ

11.

• SkyBet.com, a popular UK-based gambling website has a button which does something.

• A lot of people have written to facebook and Netflix asking them to include this feature too.

• What does clicking on the button do?

Answer

• Turn the page into an excel sheet so that the user can be pretending to be doing work when a boss walks by