Tech Quiz by Francis James, Harish Krishna at IIIT Hyderabad, Feb 2015

2. Congrats to the finalists!

3. • 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

4. Round 1
Infinite Bounce + Pounce
+10 Direct
+10/-10 Pounce

5. 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)

8. • Felix Baumgartner

9. 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?

11. • Woody Guthrie
• Richard Stallman

12. 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.

13. ● 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?

15. ● 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

16. 4. Connect

18. • Streisand Effect

19. 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?

21. • Writing if(2==i) rather than (i==2)
• (2=i) would return an error
• Called Yoda conditions

22. 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?

24. • 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.

25. 7.
• This house you see here is the Nigerian embassy in Prague. 10 years
ago, it witnessed the killing of the Consul General, Michael Lekara
Wayid by an enraged Jiří Pasovský. Why was Pasovský angry?

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

28. 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?

30. • The jump in Prince of Persia

31. 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?

33. • Video Assist (or Video Tap)
• Jerry Lewis

34. 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?

36. • I, Rowboat

37. 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?

39. • Kasparov’s match against IBM Deep Blue

40. 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?

42. • He found that the average length of his sentences was 160 characters
• Length of an SMS

43. Round 2: Tech in Movies
Written Round
5 Questions
+10 for every correct answer

44. 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

45. 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 Preskill
on 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?

46. 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?

47. Funda?

48. 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)

50. • Please exchange sheets

51. 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

53. 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 Preskill
on 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?

54. • The black hole simulations for Interstellar

55. 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?

57. Funda?

59. 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?

61. Answer
• The “it’s a UNIX system” scene in Jurassic Park
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB
9Ng

62. Round 3
12 Questions
Counter-clockwise
Infinite Bounce +10
No Pounce

63. 1.
• This is a pretty unusual, but incomplete list. Think recent, and wacky.
Have left out the most famous one.
Dead flowers
Fish
Fecal matter of various animals
Crustaceans
Scathing correspondence
• What is left out?

65. • Ship your enemies glitter

66. 2.
• What’s been blanked out?

68. • How to look at your website

69. 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 shlokas
on 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?

72. • The Euler Knight problem

73. 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

76. 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.”

78. • The cover of Introduction to Algorithms

79. 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

82. 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?

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

85. 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?

88. 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?

90. • 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

91. 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

93. • Netflix

94. 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’?

97. Stuxnet

98. 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

100. • The mouse curser was tilted by 45 degrees

101. Final Round
LVC
+30/-15
+20/-10
+10/0

105. +30/-15

109. +20/-10

113. +10/0

114. Scores

115. The End.

116. 12.
• A new character was introduced in Unicode 1.1.0 in June 1993
(among many others, obviously). Encoding table below.

117. • 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?

118. Look of disapproval
ಠ_ಠ

119. 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?

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