404: A General Quiz, Computer Science Flavoured

404
A General Quiz: CS Flavoured.
Presented by the Quiz Club of St Stephens College, proctored by Lael
John and Agastya Pulapaka

Thanks to Aditya Krishna, Amal
Augustine, Ishaan Srivastava and Hardik
Phalet for being guinea pigs for all
these questions, and for making a few
themselves.

Rules
● The Finals will have 24 Questions.
● Scoring is +15/0 on Bounce, +30/-20 on Pounce.
● Questions will be conducted clockwise(1-6) for the first
12, counterclockwise for the next 12.
● QM’s decision cannot be overridden.

Q1.
In order to create this now iconic effect for an iconic film series, designer
Simon Whiteley used a custom typeface, which he said borrowed heavily from his
Japanese wife's sushi recipes. The effect, due to its coloration and downward
fluid motion, is given a particular two word name, although it is also
referred to by other names, with the film title included.
Swapping out the coloration aspect for a scientific term (which is commonly
depicted with the same color in media), we get a very well known phenomenon
that has adverse effects on many calcium based structures.
Give both the effect and the phenomenon.

Q2.
X is a phrase from a 1983 film, centered around a teenager who unwittingly
hacks their way into a system they were never intended to access. The phrase
might be familiar to younger viewers, born after the turn of the millennium,
as it appeared in a film Y, part of a much larger franchise, during scene
where the main characters are accessing a rather archaic (in terms of the tech
used) database.
Y is the prequel to the introduction of Z back into the franchise, after a
long and painful custody battle with A. A was most famously known around the
time of the release of Y for being hacked, and a politically charged movie
being leaked all over the internet.
ID X, Y, Z

A2.
X: “Shall we play a game?”, first seen in WarGames (1983)
Y: Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Z: Spider-Man

Q3.
Most of us might not have been active internet users in 2005, when X was
a popular social networking site, and the year Samy Kamkar created the
first Y, the fastest spreading virus of all time. Y is quite different
when you compare it with a virus (biologically speaking, of course), and
is much more akin to a certain class of animals. Y's also play a part in
a seminal 1965 sci-fi novel Z, that first made its way to the silver
screen in the year that Apple released the Macintosh, and is now getting
a remake that has been delayed to 2021.
Give X, Y and Z

A3.
X: MySpace
Y: Worm
Z: Dune

Q4.
In 1962, President Kennedy was fearful that individual military commanders had
too much leeway to launch a nuclear attack on their own initiative, and
instituted a new policy that an eight-digit password would be necessary to
launch missiles. Air Force officers, more fearful of a delayed nuclear
response than a rogue commander, followed the letter if not the spirit of the
rule and used ________ in every missile silo - and, just like half the people
in your office do with their passwords, they then wrote the eight-digit
sequence on a piece of paper to make sure nobody forgot. The Air Force
disputes this story, but it comes from Bruce Blair, who was an Air Force
launch officer in the 1970s.
What was the password, which I hope none of you use?

Q5.
In 2010, the United States Air Force used 1,760 Xs consoles
to build a supercomputer for the Department of Defense. They
used Xs because it was more cost efficient and “green.” What
is X?
This particular supercomputer was nicknamed Y, a two word
alliterative name that includes a bird of importance to
several South American nations, and a word that would
describe the way in which the Xs have been connected.

Q6.
This film begins with the fundamental question: “Should people be allowed to save someone
who doesn’t want to be saved?” Following legislation that seems inevitable in these sort
of films, this one revolves around our protagonist and family, as they lead double lives.
Once our protagonist is hired by a secret organisation to help them with certain
difficulties at their headquarters, they discover that they’re trapped, forced to fight
against a machine.
Our protagonist finds the password to a computer in a cave, carved out in a cave by a
predecessor, whose remains are propped up against a rock. Interestingly, the password
could only be seen by sitting exactly where the dead superhero lay. The password to the
computer has a link to Greek mythology, and seems to have been discovered in the nick of
time, as the protagonist learns of the countless others like them, killed in order to
train the machine to be able to kill him.
Identify the company that produced the film, notable for its work in pushing the
boundaries of its field, the password, and the dead predecessor’s power (funda).

A6.
PIXAR
Kronos / Chronos
Destructive beams of light emit from his eyes / Laser Eyes

Q7.
X was featured heavily in a 2013 instalment of a particular
franchise/series. Headed by a rather explosive CEO(the antagonist), the
company grew from a small think tank into one of the largest tech firms
in this universe, even assisting in the redoing of an icon for the
nation the film is set in.
Now, in the real world, three companies came together in 1992 to form a
particular alliance to end the monopoly of Microsoft in the tech world.
This alliance was also named X, (formed by the initials of the three
companies) and each of the companies can be considered a pioneering firm
in their niche of the technological world, ultimately resulting in their
clearest success being the PowerPC.
ID the three companies, which will automatically give you X.

Q8.
In this pseudo documentary movie, one character tells a story of how seafood
suppliers had trouble shipping live cod from the U.S. to China – on arrival,
the meat was mushy because the cod had been sluggish. But the suppliers found
that if they put one of the cod’s natural enemies in the tank with them, they
stayed active, and the exercise made their flesh stay firmer and tastier.
"There are those people who are these enemies in life,” the character says,
“and they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you
thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank god for them, because we would be
droll, boring and dull if we didn't have somebody nipping at our fin.”
This movie led to the rise of a term used pretty often by ‘dumb’ people on the
internet. What term, commonly used in a situation that doesn't meet
expectations?

Q9.
Released in 1982, this movie began development in 1976, inspired by the video game Pong.
The movie centres around a hacker trying to overcome an artificial intelligence (virtual
intelligence acc to the wiki) that works in the company they were kicked out of. The
hacker gets transported into the world of the mainframe computer (remember 1982) and has
to interact with personified programs, who recognize him as a ____. The titular character
X is a program, created by the hackers friend, to help protect the system.
Fast forward to the sequel in 2010, and we enter the world of X , otherwise known as the
Grid, where the son of the previous protagonist is forced to fight in gladiatorial
contests known as Y wars, before being challenged to an iconic Z battle by CLU, the
program in charge. Z battles were also a part of the original film, and we do see an
iconic prop from the original in the sequel.
Y were once a widely popular format of storing digital media, and you’d be hard pressed to
use one in a current laptop, given that they began to be phased out around the 2016-17
mark.
Z’s are altogether fictional, and are a combination of two words. They are vehicles that
one rides sort of like the BatBike, and leave a glowing trail of light in their wake when
going fast enough.
Identify X, Y and Z.

A9.
X: TRON
Y: Disc/Disk/CD
Z: LightCycle

Q10.
X Y is a technical term for a kind of CGI, developed by Ken X in 1982
for the Disney film Z. In 1997, he was awarded the Academy Award for
Technical Achievement, for creating such an algorithm.
A is an album that's very popular for its 5th track, one that all school
children are sure to have heard at some point in their lives. Now the
album itself reminds one of a famous event in history, taking place
somewhere with a name pronounced similar to X, but these many hints is
literally casting pearls before swine.
Y is a term we're lot more familiar with, particularly the engineers who
are seeing this question. Laymen will have caught a glimpse of this
phenomenon while watching content produced by a network, whose logo is
accompanied by an iconic sound.
ID XY

Q11.
When coming up with X in the 1980s, the creative team of Nintendo
sought inspiration from a popular comic strip of the time. While an
official agreement with the comic strip team was cancelled, Nintendo
decided to make a similar plotline for the game, featuring original
characters. This resulted in one of the main elements of X being a
love triangle that mirrored the one present in the comic strip,
which featured a comically large/muscular man(leading him to
resemble something), a man in an iconic uniform of sorts, and a
damsel in distress, whose counterpart in X went so far as to also
being named after a food item.
ID both X and the comic strip.

Q12.
This studio is a pioneer in the world of digital animation, paving the way for
films that began to create characters that would become familiar to
generations of kids. Their largest franchise recently introduced two new major
characters, one of whom has an iconic coloured vehicle and costume. This
character X is voiced by a legend in a completely unrelated genre, more known
for their live action movies, and recent showing in the video game world.
The franchise is also remembered for a scene in the second movie, riffing off
of another popular franchise (owned now by the same parent company), with a
key dialogue between a protagonist, and someone he seems to have been created
to destroy.
Name the voice actor for X, and the scene that the second movie is parodying

A12.
X - Keanu Reeves
Empire Strikes Back - “Luke, I am your father”

Q13.
When you agree to the Terms & Conditions for this app/service, you are
agreeing to not use it to make nuclear weapons.
The clause states, “You also agree that you will not use these products
for….the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear,
missile, or chemical or biological weapons.
This is ironic considering how extremely unlikely it is that you would
build nukes using this app/service
What app/service is being talked about here?

Q14.
I'm talking about two companies
The first company was called akebono.stanford.edu.
The current name is derived from a slang in Gulliver's travels,
which was a fictional race of beings in the book.
The second company was called Cadabra.com, and it used to only
be an online bookstore.
Name both companies. What are the two reasons the company
changed its name from Cadabra.com?

A14.
Yahoo!
Amazon.
Amazon starts with an A, and their lawyer heard cadabra as
‘cadaver’

Q15.
This collection of something, created by X, is one of the
fundamental aspects of the world in this 2004 futuristic movie. X
may have been inspired by Newton, Kepler, etc while creating this
collection.
While the film wasn't intended to have any connection to X's works,
in fact it had an entirely separate screenplay titled Hardwired, it
finally credited X's works as a suggestion, although it shares the
exact same name as the works of X.
Give me the collection, X and the film.

A15.
Laws of Robotics
Asimov
I, Robot

Q16.
The service A was a free web based application launched by AltaVista. The
company was taken over by B, but A retained its iconic name, until 2012, when
it was replaced by an alternative by Bing. The name of the service itself, is
based on a species in one of the most iconic sci-fi series of all time. The
species had a particularly useful ability, one that bridged communication gaps
across the universe. Such accurate and instantaneous communication between
different people is the goal behind a lot of attempts by tech companies to
create services that go leaps and bounds ahead of A.
The name of the species is also an allusion by the author of the series to a
certain biblical passage. Interestingly, the root word of A is also the name
of an open source JavaScript compiler, designed to keep JS code up to date.
Identify A,B, and the sci-fi series

A16.
A - Babelfish
B - Yahoo!
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Q17.
X is a famous beauty of classic Hollywood; she was also
mathematically gifted and had learned a lot of about weapons systems
from her first husband, an arms manufacturer. She was friends with
George Antheil, an avante-garde composer with similarly broad
interests (he wrote a book on endocrinology).
Together, during World War II, the two of them patented a technology
that would allow radio signals to torpedos to hop from frequency to
frequency and avoid being jammed. The Navy rejected it at the time,
but took it up 20 years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
the patent figured into the development of numerous broadcast
standards, including Y.
ID X, Y.

Q18.
This man is notable for beginning his campaign for the President of the United
States in 2020, that was suspended on Nov 1 2019. The man was also recently revealed
to be a member of a hacker group X, back when he was a teenager, which was notorious
for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running
Microsoft’s Windows. The man wrote numerous poems and texts for the group, under the
pseudonym “Y Z”.
Now X would be quite a horrific name for any organisation in present day India, and
might even result in one of its members being lynched, before the purpose or the
actual content discussed on the group is examined.
Y is an adjective, usually used in terms of the 60’s, to describe the hippy
movement, rock and roll, and art.
Z is a term one would associate with Genghis Khan, or the movie, “The Secret Life of
Walter Mitty”
ID X, Y and Z

A18.
Cult of the Dead Cow, Psychedelic, Warlord

Q19.
This TV show is iconic, for the tough themes it brings to light for children
to understand. Originally started as an educational programme in its home
country, its protagonist was created to be antithetical to popular heroes of
the time, who were violent frequently “for the right reasons”. Nothing
distinguished them so much other than a genetic oddity, and their tool of
choice, which could never be used as a weapon. The show took a quite a bit of
a break in the 1990’s, only to be revived in the mid 2000’s with most of its
mythology cut away, leaving only the ‘good bits’ according to its showrunner
at the time.
Give the show, the genetic oddity of the protagonist, and the name of the
tool. The tool of choice is a futuristic version of something that is most
commonly used to repair rather than destroy. The genetic oddity might cause
some doctors palpitations when they see it for the first time.

A19.
Doctor Who
Sonic Screwdriver
Two hearts instead of one.

Q20.
One might know this famous French hacker by his online alias, one created based on a persona in a
popular TV series. The hacker was able to scrape through the entire Aadhar website in batches and
download photographs with their corresponding Aadhar numbers. They have also been at the forefront
of pinpointing security vulnerabilities in major government and political party tech initiatives.
More interestingly, their alias, comes from a show dealing with such security experts and exploits,
the key logo of the show reminiscent of a very famous comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The
hacker’s twitter handle is the name of the collective (X) that the protagonist of the show joins,
with a motive to create a better version of the world.
X might be a censored slogan one may have heard edgy teenagers use at some point in their lives,
when railing against the constraints of society.The actor who plays the protagonist has won Best
Actor in a Television Series, multiple years in a row at the Golden Globes.
Name the show, the collective or the hacker’s twitter handle, and the name of the protagonist of
the show.

A20.
Mr. Robot, FSociety, Elliot Alderson

Q21.
X is a fictional company, one that we see as the big bad in a show Y by the
network that also brought us Mr. Robot. X is headed by a rather stereotypical
tech billionaire CEO, about to be ousted by a small start up Z.
The show is a sublime parody of the tech scene most software engineers dream
about getting into, and the naming of the companies X is a clever reference to
two big rivals in the history of the Internet.
The first company has the name of a species seen only in fiction, ruled over
by benevolent equine masters (Jonathan Swift was at his finest). The second
was pretty famous for its Moonshot division.
X is a 5 letter word, the first half of a synonym of how one might describe
the first company's namesake species, and phonetically similar to the second.
If you find you've reached a nonsensical word, it'll be correct if it rhymes
with a particular root, famous in Hindi for making people gassy

A21.
Hooli
3 points if you identify Y, Z

Q22.
This classic 1999 film begins with a key phrase X. The film then goes on
to describe a very dystopian future, one that we seem to be on the track
towards, with our current love for “AI”, but the phrase X is in fact an
ode to a pretty old piece of literature. The various iterations/aspects
of the phrase may now have seeped into current usage, especially with
our growing usage of social media sites, and our deep dives within those
sites.
We also find a reference to X in one of Michael Crichton’s most popular
novels, involving Dennis Nedry, a programmer who decides to go rogue,
and references X in his code.
Give the phrase X, and the book or author.

A22.
Follow the white rabbit
Alice in Wonderland/Lewis Carroll

Q23.
X is a show that was quite recently in the news, and is notable for its
connection to the company Y. Y in 2011 was notable for creating Z,
responsible for defeating two previous winners of X.
The year 1969 was quite eventful with regards to scientific
breakthroughs and innovation. At Y, Forrest Parry invented the P, one
that revolutionized transactions. Most of us will be more familiar (and
frustrated) with the act of using a P because of our current interest in
Q, something that recently garnered a lot of attention, particularly
political attention, when a member of a current, very polarising, four
member group, hosted their first live stream.
ID P, Q and why X was recently in the news

A23.
P - Credit Cards/Swipe Cards/ Magnetic Swipe Cards.
Q - Among Us
Jeopardy was recently in the news because Alex Trebek passed
away.

Q24.
The X, of 420,000 devices, was an example of a commonly used thing to perform DDoS,
created by an anonymous hacker to measure the extent of the Internet in what the
creator called the “Internet Census of 2012”.
The data was collected by infiltrating internet devices, especially routers, that
lacked any real password protection.
Whether ironic or not, it was named after the Roman goddess of inner organs and
health, whose name originates from the Latin word for flesh, and hence also forms
the beginning of words related to consuming it.
ID the two word name of X.

404: A General Quiz, Computer Science Flavoured

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