LiteralRhinoceros wrote: ↑December 7th, 2019, 8:07 pm
Astro (1): maybe i'm just bad but the only thing we I lost points on was DSOs (referring to Name's post) mainly for being unspecific about answers. Actual ID was easy, but nothing that you really had to think about on the whole test. (5/10)
Congrats on winning! I haven't seen my test yet but personally I went into extreme detail explaining the DSOs because we had the time to. I think I might've lost a point or two on m87 though, I wasn't fully sure of one or two things (it was very large array right?). Full scoring everything else is very impressive though!
Also I thought the CMB stuff was somewhat thought provoking (idk if my answer was even right) although it was only 2 qs. Also the first 3 IDs were literally the first 3 dsos...
As a side note I tried test running using a binder over a laptop. Honestly I feel like a laptop vs binder is almost the same thing. Binder is prob faster, but speed isn't really a issue here lol.
I didn't do the CMB stuff but iirc my partner just looked it up on his comp. Was interesting though
oh it was astronomical inferometry
Feedback for events:
Write It Do It : The model was pretty hard but do-able. Although I noticed the models were different at each station which kinda bugged me. Also a team had their do-er walk into the writers room and talk to their team"s writer and then proceed to say "Whoops this isn't the do-ers room" and the procters just let her leave the room after seeing the model. Thank god that the event supervisor did something about it. 7/10
Wright Stuff: I was thrown into the event so no complains really. There were minimal people in the room and we were able to do a bunch of practice flights. 9/10
Boomilever: The event ran really smoothly and the people proctoring were really really nice and tried to help us and give us some pointers for next time. 10/10
Sounds of Music: The software they used couldnt really pick up some of our notes compared to the ones that we used when practicing which was a bummer. Test was challenging and it ran pretty smoothly. 8/10
The competition itself: Honestly I had a lot of fun but they should not be charging $3 for a can of soda and $2 for a small bag of chips. Plus they unplugged all the vending machines which was kind of weird. I wish the grading process was better excecuted but I guess thats what happens with a 120 team competition. School was pretty cramped at times especially the axillary gym.
shadow19 wrote: ↑December 8th, 2019, 9:30 am
All of the vending machines just so happened to be unplugged and out of order, charging 3 dollars for soda and two for a bag of chips is just a scam.
What! That's absolutely ridiculous. So essentially they forced you to pay for that or go off the premises (if you had transportation). And they forced you to stay an extra hour and a half for the award ceremony. Unacceptable.
EDIT: Which teams were stacked and which weren't? Staples wasn't stacked and we were missing some people due to SAT's, so our superscore may be more accurate for our standings.
Name wrote: ↑December 7th, 2019, 7:06 pm
Code (1): Test was pretty good. Nothing exceptional although idk is it possible to make a exceptional code test? Anyways nothing wrong with the questions itself (I couldn't get one pollux although apparently other ppl did get it and it made sense). We apparently solved either 1:13 or 1:18 (not sure which) and missed one pollux and one bacon assuming we didn't screw anything up. Test lacked rsas and whatever but it's supposed to be mostly regionals level anyways. Having all 72 teams do code at once was prob a huge challenge and they managed to do it well (rip teams that came in late). Given circumstances 9.5/10
Great job to you and your team. It was 1:18 with 30 total teams getting it in a mean time of 6:36 and median 6:28. Score distribution went well with only two ties at 51st place and another at 0 points. The venue was certainly a challenge based on only having half of the judges anticipated showing up and having non-Codebusters people trying to walk through the event to get somewhere else. I did follow Regional-level rules and tried not to make it too challenging since this was an early invitational. I promise my tests will provide you all with more of a challenge as the season goes on.
shadow19 wrote: ↑December 8th, 2019, 9:30 am
All of the vending machines just so happened to be unplugged and out of order, charging 3 dollars for soda and two for a bag of chips is just a scam.
What! That's absolutely ridiculous. So essentially they forced you to pay for that or go off the premises (if you had transportation). And they forced you to stay an extra hour and a half for the award ceremony. Unacceptable.
EDIT: Which teams were stacked and which weren't? Staples wasn't stacked and we were missing some people due to SAT's, so our superscore may be more accurate for our standings.
Ward Meville, Stuy, Rustin, Kellenberg, Syo, GNS were stacked.
It seems like WWP North, Cumberland, South were unstacked. Both North and Cumberland were accidentally a little skewed to one team. I don't know about South, but they also seemed unstacked but skewed.
SoCal Planning Team & BirdSO Tournament Director WW-P HSN '22, Community MS '18 Sciolyperson1's Userpage
Other than the obvious pain of the delayed awards (which wouldn't have been nearly as bad if they didn't pile us all in that sweltering gym immediately beforehand), it generally went pretty smoothly, at least from my perspective. (Then again, I've seen much worse, like Cornell 2019...)
In terms of events, here's how I'd comment.
Detector Building (1st): Event ran well, with few issues (bar me forgetting a second thermometer to calibrate against -- luckily we had one floating around in a Chem Lab box, which turned out to be far more accurate than the last one I was using. A terrible fate turned into a nice surprise with that one.) The event supervisors were friendly. My only "gripe" was that the range of temperatures that were sampled was fairly narrow, and all of them were in the "blue" section. My green and red LEDs sat dejected and unused and I had to console them afterwards.
Circuit Lab (2nd): Yikes. The lab itself was very easy and didn't pose much of a challenge. The test is best described as "vector pigeon." The latter half, mostly electronics and capacitor-heavy, was very fair, and we did rather well on it. The first half was a mess of electric fields and fluxes, made worse by the oddly-shaped math. Pretty sure this would either require a massive formula sheets or some integration. Unfortunately, linear algebra isn't one of my strong suites, so I basically used multiple guess techniques for the whole first half.
Sounds of Music (3rd): This was the last event of the day and generally fairly cheerful. The test ran well for us, except for a handful of questions. We didn't have phon/sone stuff in the binder, and trying to identify the intervals in the Star Spangled Banner was very, very difficult. They were probably thirds or something but I'm not sure.
Code Busters: The test was unusual. A lot of teams got the bonus very quickly, obviously recognizing the quote. We took quite a bit longer but still got some bonus points. For the first time in (many) tests we got the Xenocrypt as well. Notably, some questions/ciphers that were usually assigned high point values (Morbit/Pollux, etc.) were assigned lower ones, something that might have affected our placement. I ended up skipping a morse cipher when I saw there were three "space" characters in a row (or something similar, I don't remember.) I haven't gotten a chance to look at the test yet, so we'll see what that actually was.
Chemistry Lab: (35th, oof): Not sure what went wrong. This could simply have been due to similar scores and a great number of teams present, but I think there was something unusual about the event. Perhaps the supervisors didn't like us using all three NaOH pellets (I'd like to say it was planned for better accuracy, but it was just because I added too much HCl, since I couldn't stir/add at the same time). I'd like to hear what anyone else thought of the event. Cleanup was a little more difficult for us because we had no working taps at our table (and had to use beakered water).
Kellenberg Div. C D (rip States 2020)
Circuit Lab, Chemistry Lab, Code Busters, Detector Building, Machines, Sounds of Music, Fermi Emeritus
93 medals.
Victim of the great CoVID Bamboozle of 2020.
waterlubber wrote: ↑December 8th, 2019, 4:39 pm
Code Busters: The test was unusual. A lot of teams got the bonus very quickly, obviously recognizing the quote. We took quite a bit longer but still got some bonus points. For the first time in (many) tests we got the Xenocrypt as well. Notably, some questions/ciphers that were usually assigned high point values (Morbit/Pollux, etc.) were assigned lower ones, something that might have affected our placement. I ended up skipping a morse cipher when I saw there were three "space" characters in a row (or something similar, I don't remember.) I haven't gotten a chance to look at the test yet, so we'll see what that actually was.
We did not recognize the quote. We assumed the second word was "the" because it appeared twice and the freq of letters and filled in the rest. It was solved in the same way we normally solve any aristo.
I do agree that the point value of morbit/pollux was low (IMO most tests I've seen set it very low, besides cornell, I haven't seen Morbit/Polluxes with high point values). I think for those lengths something closer to 250-300 points would be better.
South Woods MS, Syosset HS '21
BirdSO TD/ES
Past Events: Microbe, Invasive, Matsci, Fermi, Astro, Code, Fossils
1st place MIT Codebusters 2019-2020
1st place NYS Fermi Questions (2019), Astronomy and Codebusters (2021)
Science Olympiad Founder's Scholarship winner
Wright (15th): Planes were measured with a yardstick and was weighed with a scale that had an accuracy of 0.1g. I also saw the ES handling the plane of the team in front of us during check in, which should be disallowed by the rules. They were nice though and other than that, the event ran surprisingly quickly and well for a 69 team tournament. 6/10
PPP (1st): Supervisors were nice but event wasn't run well either. I heard from others that the measured times were inaccurate, which is a really big problem when 40 teams have times of 2 to 5 seconds. There was also a problem with the launcher leaking air. Venue 2/10 but overall 7/10
Sounds (10th): The test was similar to the previous year's test because a lot of the topics were the same, but no questions were reused. Instrument part went well, they had 2 soundproof rooms to do tuning/testing. Tuning was measured with a microphone and some kind of an online tool, worked alright for me. 9/10
West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North '22
BirdSO Co-Director My Userpage
Thank god that the event supervisor did something about it. 7/10
