Question - 610

The world championships of which school-yard game?

Hint:

Answer: Conkers, "a game traditionally played by children in Britain, Ireland, and some former British colonies using the seeds of horse-chestnut trees." Only Anand got. Awesome!

Question - 584

Who is the guy in the middle upending the table?

Question - 564

What historic but anti-climactic event?

Answer: Zenyatta (after 19 straight wins) finally loses in her last race. Dinesh, Vetti, and mekie got it (Hirak too, if he was using some racing jargon that I don't get).

Question - 559

Identify the game.

Answer: The game is Craps. Firebringer, Hirak, Krithi, and Divya Shankar got it right, even down to the obvious pun. Well done.

Question - 553

Identify.

Answer: This is the popular multiplayer boardgame Settlers of Catan. Dinesh, Ameya, Hirak, and Iam got it. Well done.

Question - 550

Identify and connect. (Hint: the question number)

Answer: The connection is the Duckworth-Lewis (D/L) method used in Cricket to calculate a target score in a weather (or otherwise) interrupted game. The plot shows how this calculation is performed (top left) along with the two statisticians, its namesakes, who came up with it (bottom left). The right picture is of the Irish pop group who call themselves, rather geekily, the Duckworth-Lewis Method. Dinesh, Shravan, KAMANASISH,AEC, Vetti, Ramki, Rajesh K, and AJ got it. Extra points to Dinesh for spotting the cheap DL=550 trick.

Question - 489

Identify or connect.

Answer: The connect is Luis Ramirez de Lucena (bottom right). He is the author of the oldest existing printed book on chess - Repetición de Amores e Arte de Axedrez or Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess published in 1497 (a page from the book is shown on the left). The Lucena postion (top right) is a famous chess endgame position named after him. Matti, Kamal, Manix, Divya, Anand, and Rajeev got it right. Well done. Dinky is back at the helm from Monday. It's been fun. Thanks for playing.

Question - 460

These are the two most famous examples of what?

Answer: The answer I was looking for was Kill Screen - the name given to a level in a video game beyond which it is impossible for any player to proceed due to fundamental programming flaws or design oversights. They are most often found in the early arcade games (Pac-man and Donkey Kong shown here) where register overflow errors were the frequent culprits. The Pac-man kill screen is especially famous with even a $100,000 reward for a player who can get past this level. Mekie, Iam and Hari got the answer I had in mind while Adi and Schmetterling went with more generic connects. Well done.

Question - 383

The guy on the right made the chart on the left for a specific reason. Who is he and what is the chart for?

Answer: The guy is Alfred Mosher Butts, the inventor of Scrabble. The chart shows a frequency analysis study that he conducted on various sources such as the New York Times to decide the point value for the various tiles. I hope it wasn't too obvious from the visual that he is sitting on a bunch of scrabble tiles. P, Karthik, Srivats, Hirak and Rajeev got it. Well done.