AlphaBit 2018 Final

AlphaBit 2018
Quiz - Finals
SWETABH CHANGKAKOTI
PRANAV GUPTA
VACHAS CHATURVEDI
Ft. JAISAL KOTHARI

Questions
related to
tech
Questions you
think aren’t
related to tech,
but really are

Rules:
● 36 questions in total.
● Infinite Pounce + Bounce.
● Direct +10.
● Pass +10.
● Pounce +10/-5.

Question 1
XY is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It's run by
thousands of people all over the world and can be installed on almost anything.
When these computers "sleep", the XY comes on and the computers
communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating
morphing abstract animations known as "Y".
Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations
using the keyboard. The more popular Y live longer and reproduce according to a
genetic algorithm with mutation and crossover. Hence, the Y evolve to please
their global audience.
What are Y and what famous 1968 work does the title, XY, allude to?

Answer 1
Electric Sheep
This references Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip
K. Dick, i.e. Blade Runner

Question 2
Xkcd #903, first published on 25th May 2011, along with its usual comic, carried an alt-text that
revealed an interesting piece of trivia about X, which, today, is pretty much common knowledge:
Y is a major organizing principle, or funnel for the ideas represented on X. Intrigued by the xkcd
observation and its antecedents, University of Vermont Computational Story Lab researchers
Mark Ibrahim, Christopher Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds decided to use the web of “first
links” to understand something about the structure of X knowledge. Their idea was to find those
access points—what they call funnels—for X pages.
While Y was by far the largest funnel, all of which made what’s next on the list, while much
smaller in terms of the number of source pages, also much weirder. At number two, with about
30,000 source pages funneling into it, is Presentation (as in getting up in front of people and
explaining something), followed by Tree of Life (Biology) and Southeast Europe. Hip-Hop Music
comes in at number 11.
What are X and Y?

Answer 2
X- Wikipedia
Y- Philosophy

Question 3
The time from 12th February to 2nd March, 2014, witnessed tensions along political lines erupt in what can
only be described as all-out war among hundreds of thousands of ‘combatants’, though not the kind you would
generally expect. This event was streamed online, and more than 29.5 million total viewers watched millions of
players wrestle in real time over the control of a character.
Some people describe this as a social experiment, of sorts, with a major cause of debate being one of its
foremost questions and elements: Democracy versus Anarchy. Participants were allowed to vote for either
game mode in the chat window. Under anarchy, all inputs were received and executed by the emulator in
sequence, which often results in chaos and confusion, whereas under democracy, inputs were tallied up over the
course of 20 seconds and the command with the most votes is executed, leading to slower, but more efﬁcient
execution.
Despite all odds, the experiment ended in success, and forged an unusual following of dedicated fans, replete
with political philosophies, messianic ﬁgures, heroic epics, and (of course) memes.
Name the experiment.

Question 4
X’s Y, pictured below in its raw hex version, includes text from the UK Times
newspaper saying “03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” a
reference to X’s birth-date and possibly mocking fractional reserve banking. What
are X and Y? (Y is a term, not an entity)

Answer 4
X- Bitcoin
Y- Genesis Block

Question 5
Connect:
- Animality
- Babality
- Hara-kiri
- Faction kill
- Friendship
- Brutality

Answer 5
Variations of Fatality in Mortal Kombat

Question 6
X was a one-of-its-kind music festival that occurred on 23rd September this year. In
a quote from one of its attendees, “The X server was a community project built over
the last month, and the results were breathtaking. A meticulously designed central
hub guided attendees between the two stages, REDBLOCKS and BEDROCKS. Giant
community creations like a colorful Ferris wheel, to-scale IKEA blimp, giant vodka
bottle, and IHOB restaurant ﬂanked the skyline from every angle.” By the end of the
night, X had seen over 2,600 attendees in the server and over 27,000 people listen in
on Mixlr. “It was no longer just me playing _____ with a music stream in the
background, but a crowd of people experiencing the same cool thing together.” What
is X? (Image on next slide)

Answer 6
X - Coalchella (in Minecraft)

Question 7
In May 2007, an AACS encryption key came to prominence on the internet, allegedly
assisting in the decryption of any HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc released before that date.
This subsequently prompted a series of cease-and-desist letters, claiming that the
key itself was, therefore, a copyright circumvention device and that publishing the
key violates Title 1 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In an interesting twist, internet users began circulating versions of this image, calling
it the Free Speech Flag, in blog posts on dozens of websites and as user avatars on
forums such as Digg.
Give funda for why this was the ﬂag chosen to lead this digital revolt.
(Image on next slide)

Answer 7
Protesters converted the key to hexadecimal and mapped the resultant
numbers to colours. These colours, put together, formed the flag, which
they were insistent on sharing.
They argued that is numbers could be made illegal, so could basic
sequences of colours, and aimed to point out the absurdity of their
opposers.

Question 8
The image (on the next slide) is the entrance to a business center in St. Petersburg,
which is the headquarters for the Internet Research Agency, also known as the _____
_______. This agency is known for paying its employees better-than-average salaries
while also providing stability in journalism and writing, which is what initially
attracted many of its employees. Now, however, it is notorious for a different reason,
which lends to its nickname, i.e. the blanks. Put funda and FITB (blanks indicative of
length).

Question 9
On 25th July 2017, Forbes published an article analyzing the movement of the X
market and ranking its top investors. They based this study on the platform Y and its
traders. For this purpose, they looked at the positions that the traders took between
February 28 and April 27, 2017. The article described the market as going through
“drastic, sudden swings”, increasing 389% from February 28 through April 26, then
falling 85% from April 26 to April 27. In this period, 25 traders posted gains, 7
traders had no gains or losses, and 25 lost on their calls. 21 traders outperformed
the market’s moving average growth. What are X and Y?

Answer 9
X- Memes (on r/MemeEconomy)

Question 10
The last few months have seen a number of complaints regarding a new series of
establishments. While such places have already been set up in Toronto, Paris, and
the UK for example, a recent aim to move into Houston led to protests from
Christian and conservative groups, eventually preventing their entry into the USA.
Some believe these establishments will help curb an important issue (especially
considering the MeToo movement), while others believe it will but propagate its
counterpart. What exactly am I talking about here?

Question 11
Following is a video of Icelandic art-pop artist Björk performing Thunderbolt, off her
2011 album Biophilia. What does she use to play the song’s bassline?

Question 12
While most current games of its kind are dropping the system in question, eg. World
of Warcraft, skill trees were one of the most prominent aspects of MMO-RPGs. The
process of ‘grinding’ and maxing out these trees enabled players to get far more out
of a game than they otherwise could. While slowly approaching obsolescence, parts
of a certain skill tree have recently resurfaced in popular forums, though in a
separate context. Where do we see these most often today?

Answer 12
Illusion- 100
From Skyrim’s
skill tree

Question 13
X was initially announced as an April Fool’s joke in a tweet by Y:
“Y was found passed out against a _____, surrounded by "X" bottles, the tracks of dried
tears still visible on his cheeks.
This is not a forward-looking statement, because, obviously, what's the point?
Happy New Month!”
Recently, however, as seen in the given form, X might actually see the light of day.
To be fair, it isn’t surprising, considering who announced it, but it’s good enough
for this question. ID X and Y.

Answer 13
X- Teslaquilla
Y- Elon Musk

Question 14
On 16 September 2008, during the 2008 US Presidential Election, the Yahoo! Account of vice
presidential candidate Sarah Palin was hacked by David Kernell. He later shared the details he obtained
from the hack on X. In a fantastically awkward testimony, similar to Zuckerberg’s, to a degree, Y, X’s
founder and then administrator, was brought in to explain X’s terminology and structure. A few
examples include:
“Q. And is there any signiﬁcance to "new fags"? A. That is the term used to describe new users to the
site.
Q. What about "b tard"? A. It's a term that users of the /b/- Random board use for themselves.
Q. What about "troll"? A. Troublemaker.
Q. In what about "peeps"? A. People.
Q. "Rickroll"? A. Rickroll is a mean or Internet kind of trend that started on X where users -- it basically a
bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up”
ID both X and Y.

Answer 14
X- 4Chan
Y- Christopher Poole

Question 15
The concept of X came from CEO Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a
social gaming platform for mobile games. Citron noted the difﬁculties that his team
had had when trying to play other representative games like Final Fantasy XIV and
League of Legends to work out gameplay concepts, speciﬁcally highlighting
problems of current Voice over IP options that were available. Some VoIP options
required players to share various IP addresses just to connect, while alternatives
were resource-heavy and had known security problems, and to combat this, he
came up with X.
In February 2018, X came into the news for being the breeding grounds for several
alt-right groups like the Atomwaffen Division, The Right Server, etc., even being
called essential to the movement, which led to it purging several of these servers.
What is X?

Question 16
A major issue of the purchase was the fact that X was a major competitor to Y,
raising many concerns among antitrust regulators, open source advocates,
customers, and employees. The EU Commission delayed the acquisition for several
months over concerns of Y's plans for MySQL. The commission ﬁnally approved the
takeover, apparently pressured by the United States to do so, according to a
Wikileaks cable released in September 2011. Several notable engineers resigned
following the acquisition, including James Gosling, the (resigned April 2010); Tim
Bray, the creator of XML (resigned February 2010); Kohsuke Kawaguchi, lead
developer of Hudson (resigned April 2010); and Bryan Cantrill, the co-creator of
DTrace (resigned July 2010). Name X and Y

Question 17
Which company’s social networking has been described?

Question 18
_____ is a language, named after a famous abstract artist, in which programs are represented as
abstract art paintings, in his characteristic style. It is stack based and Turing complete.
There are 18 colors ordered according to hue and brightness, plus black and white. These last
two have special meaning and are used for control ﬂow. The program execution relies on two
“pointers”: a Direction Pointer and a Color Block Chooser. The DP may point up, down, left and
right, while CC can only point left and right. The combination of these two pointers govern the
execution of the program: basically which block of color is executed next. The size of a block of
color represent an integer. When the program transition between different blocks of color, their
difference in hue and brightness determines the kind of command that is executed. The
commands are the usual one, like output a value, multiply, etc.
Name the language and the artist. Images follow.

A ‘Hello World’ program. A program to print
Fibonacci numbers.

Answer 18
Piet, after Piet Mondrian
A primality test in Piet.Composition A by Piet
Mondrian.

Answer 19
DPR- Dread Pirate Roberts
A transcript of him, Silk Road boss, hiring a hitman.

Question 20
In 2017, Amazon was granted a patent for a drone that could deliver a battery
charge for electric cars on the move which are running out of charge. This is one
of the many solutions that emerging for the feeling of being worried that you will
be stranded by an empty battery while on the road in an electric car. What two
word phrase is used for this?

Question 21
X is a system of trading which facilitates transaction decision making in the
ﬁnancial markets using advanced mathematical tools. In This type of a system,
the need for a humantrader’s intervention is minimised and thus the decision
making is very quick. This enables the system to take advantage of any proﬁt
making opportunities arising in the market much before a
human trader can even spot.
Identify X, also known by the name of a wrongly coloured device.

The popularity of the name X as a choice for babies has dropped signiﬁcantly in
recent years. It’s down 33 percent since 2015, Recode reports. Which, not so
coincidentally, is when Z started selling Y.
People already named X have complained in the past about the struggles of having
their name co-opted by Z. NYU graduate X Sussman referenced to the The Wall
Street Journal back in 2017 a time her dad asked her for some water and the family’s
Y chimed in offering to order a case of Fiji bottles.
Give me X,Y and Z
Question 22

Answer 22
X - Alexa
Y - Echo
Z - Amazon

Question 23
In 2007, Microsoft Office introduced a change to its default settings. According to
Joe Friend, a senior Project Manager at Microsoft, the change was necessitated due
to two factors –
1) Growth of digital consumption. Since more and more documents wouldn’t be
printed and would solely be consumed on digital devices, screen readability would
become more important.
2) Office was looking to modernize the look and feel of documents created by Office
applications since they hadn’t changed substantially since the early 90s. What was
the change that was brought about?

Answer 23
The default font was changed from Times New Roman to Calibri

Question 24
This is the image of which feature launched by a ubiquitous tech giant?

Question 25
While there are several variations of X’s origin, associated with different locations
all around the world (not the one in its name), one involves an Indian temple in Kashi,
Vishwanath which contains a large room with three time-worn posts in it,
surrounded by 64 golden disks. Brahmin priests, acting out the command of an
ancient prophecy, have been moving these disks in accordance with the immutable
rules of Brahma since that time. The puzzle is therefore also known as the _____ of
Brahma puzzle. According to the legend, when the last move of the puzzle is
completed, the world will end. What is X? (the blank refers to the ﬁrst word of X)

Question 26
“I have moved to other things.” Thus wrote X in an Email in April 2011. Except for a
few messages, most of which are believed to be hoaxes, he has not been heard from
since. Nobody has ever met him in person, no photos exist. Most books on _________
feature a lengthy chapter about who X may be. Each has its own theory, often based
on the same sources. Some locate him in Britain (because of his use of Briticisms, such
as “bloody hard”). Others reckon he is somewhere in the eastern parts of the
Americas (because of the timestamps on his emails). He has been variously identiﬁed
as a Finnish sociologist, a Japanese mathematician and an Irish student. The names
mentioned most often are Nick Szabo and Hal Finney, two American cryptographers.
Give me X

Question 27
Of all the ways one could think of to fund research in AI, X choose the most
extreme- religion. X started Way of the Future (WOTF), a religion that claims it “is
about creating a peaceful and respectful transition of who is in charge of the planet
from people to people + ‘machines’”. His ideas include feeding the ____ large, labeled
data sets; generating simulations in which it could train itself to improve; and giving
it access to church members’ social media accounts. Everything the church
develops will be open source. Name X, and explain what WOTF plans to develop.

Answer 27
X- Anthony Lewandowski
Creating an AI God

Question 28
"Until X came around, we couldn't get women to play the games," James Jarocki,
advertising promotion manager for Ball Midway, said in 1982. "Admittedly, Y was a
spin-off, but we also wanted to say thank-you to women who had started playing X."
Joyce Worley, senior editor for Electronic Games, said in 1982. “One way of looking
at Y is imagining she is being pursued by the wild males until she turns around and
captures them. She tames their wildness as it were."
ID X and Y.

Answer
X- Pac Man
Y - Ms. Pac Man

Question 29
Q: How did you come to compose "__________''?
A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my
own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming
along and saying, "Here's a speciﬁc problem -- solve it.''
The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-
blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,'' this whole list of adjectives, and
then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.''
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of
music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was
so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work.
Then when I'd ﬁnished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes
long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Who’s answering? + FITB.

Answer 29
The Windows 95 startup music, Brian Eno

Question 30
The following image is that of a special kind of cup designed by professor Mark
Weislogel of Portland State University. Its angular design exploits the effects of
surface tension, wetting and container geometry to recreate the experience of
drinking coffee as one normally would, which otherwise wouldn’t be possible due to
the esoteric behaviour of ﬂuids in such conditions. He was inspired to create this
design after Italian _____Luca Parmitano said in an interview that she missed a good
cup of coffee, as while inventions like the isspresso allow making it, drinking it is
another issue. Where was this cup intended to be used. Image on next slide.

Answer 31
Adventures of Tintin; Explorers of Moon

Question 33
During a wbur web podcast, host Tom Ashbrook noted that X, one of China's
so-called "Big Three" sounds a little like an English allusion to something beyond the
social space the company currently occupies.
"It sounds kind of like an American hip-hop name," Ashbrook told guest Lily Kuo, a
reporter for Quartz in Hong Kong.
It turns out that X derives its name from a fusion of the "Chinese characters ____ and
____ which means something like 'galloping fast information,'"
Launched in February 1999, Y is X’s ﬁrst and most notable product, and one of the
most popular instant messaging platforms in its home market. As of 31 December
2010, there were 647.6 million active Y user accounts, making it the world's largest
online community at the time. Although it has other offshoots, its gaming sector is its
most popular. Name X and Y.

Question 34
I’m playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on a laptop that sometimes struggles to stream
Netﬂix, but the laptop is operating without any hitches, like I’m on a top-of-line PC.I then
switch to playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on a Chromebook, a laptop that wasn’t
designed to ever play video games. The game works just as well. Neither computer comes
close to the recommended PC speciﬁcations for Odyssey, a graphics-intensive
role-playing game that’s expected to be among this year’s biggest sellers.” But, the game
technically isn’t running on these devices. It’s being delivered via X’s Y, a game streaming
service opened for testing in October that lets gamers play new titles at their maximum
graphics settings on devices that normally couldn’t power them. And, as a result, it’s a
problem-free experience, regardless of the device used. Identify X and Y. Image on next
slide.

Answer 34
X - Google
Y - Project Stream

Question 35
The name X was chosen through focus groups as the name was short, memorable
and easy to spell. It was believed that the word would remind the people of the
sound made during “the moment of discovery and decision making.” Coincidently, X’s
ofﬁcial Chinese name means “very certain to respond” or “very certain to answer” in
Chinese. While being tested, X’s ofﬁcial name was ‘kumo’, which came from the
japanese word for spider as well as cloud, which is basically how X works.

Question 36
“X CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated how our latest Ys- with their real-time
ray-tracing capabilities allowed our demo team to digitally rebuild one of the landing’s
iconic photographs, of astronaut Buzz Aldrin clambering down the lunar module’s
lander.
Recreating the great event with a stunning level of realism, we re-confirmed our earlier
conclusion… Our ___ architecture allowed our demo team to do this because it’s able to
trace the path of a beam of light back from the screen- or frustum, as computer
scientists call it- and bounce around a scene to render reflections, shadows, ambient
occlusion, global illumination and other visual phenomena in an instant. Prior to Y
technology, only special effects rendering farms working for weeks or months on a
single scene could manage this.”
This is from an X blog post, describing how they (re)confirmed something they first did
in 2011. What exactly were they trying to prove?

Answer 36
Nvidia- Proving the moon landing was real

0x
Put funda.
Thank you. </ans2018>

Backup Q1.
This an advertisement by which company?

Backup Q2.
X is a programming language made entirely out of one-liners from movies
featuring ________. Lauri Hartikka, its creator swapped out standard
commands with their equivalent of one-liners from movies featuring
_________. Example includes False and True, which becomes "I LIED" and
"NO PROBLEMO", respectively.
Here’s how a "Hello World!" code would look like:
IT’S SHOWTIME
TALK TO THE HAND
“Hello World’

Backup Question 3
According to game designer Warren Robinett, this traditional term was coined into
the context of media by Atari personnel who were alerted to the presence of an X
which had been hidden by Robinett in his already widely distributed game,
Adventure. Released in 1979, Atari's Adventure contains the first video game X, to
have been discovered by its players; Robinett inserted X late in the game's
development in an attempt to gain some recognition for his work, as Atari then
kept its programmers' names secret. Identify X. You see X everywhere nowadays,
from video games to movies to even functional software.

AlphaBit 2018 Final

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