
Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive - coldsoup
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/28/question-time-my-life-as-a-quiz-obsessive
======
lqet
I sometimes watch the German version of "The Chase" [0]. I am often completely
flabbergasted by the quiz competency of the Chaser. They regularly know the
answer to questions which are so outlandish that there is no way you can
explain their success only with intelligence or talent. Even if you had
absolute memory or an IQ of > 200, there is just no way you would've ever been
_exposed_ to the correct answer of some of these questions.

So paragraphs like these come as a relieve to me:

> Gibson has built himself software into which he keys facts that he comes
> across; on some days, he will add as many as 100 facts to his database,
> culled from books, TV or his perusal of The Times over breakfast. If he is
> driving and he hears something compelling on the radio, he will pull over
> and scribble it down in the notebook he always carries with him. He sets
> time aside for revision. He may decide, next week, that it’s been too long
> since he brushed up on the Vietnam war, so he will call up the file and
> study it.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(British_game_show)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_\(British_game_show\))

------
aidos
>>> European quizzes grew more capacious as well. “I’ve looked in old quiz
books, and the questions are dreadful, frankly,” Jack Waley-Cohen, one of the
question editors for the BBC show Only Connect, told me. “There was an
assumption that everybody knew the same things.” Now, quizmasters don’t ever
ask who the chancellor of the exchequer was in 1973, he said. “For one,
someone who is an expert in television or music has an opportunity to
demonstrate it, because there are questions on that. But also, the questions I
like don’t test absolute knowledge. They test lateral thinking, and your
ability to access knowledge.”

I’m sure there are plenty of Only Connect fans here (and probably some
contestants too). If you’ve never seen it, it’s well worth a watch. Any
question I manage to answer is a massive outlier, but frequently enough I’m
left thinking “I Should have seen that”.

~~~
ThePadawan
I still hold those moments where I had the answer to a five-pointer question
very dear to my heart.

It's very curious how some questions are so British that I can't even relate
to the explanation after the fact, but others (especially punny questions) are
probably more front-of-mind to ESL speakers.

~~~
aidos
So memorable. My greatest triumph being “Extra special”. (Spoiler: I count
myself in the vanishing small Only Connect segment that both shops at ASDA and
buys the premium range)

------
ficklepickle
One place the information age has failed us so far is with trivia/quiz
questions. There are surprisingly few open repositories of quality questions.

There is the Open Trivia DB, which isn't really open but exposes a free API.
It's also a bit heavy on video/computer game questions for my tastes and
doesn't support multiple categories per API request. It's either all
categories or one.

I like to play trivia games on my phone on transit, etc. All I could find was
crap, often full of ads. So I made one, a couple years ago. It's kinda crap
too, so now I'm making another.

The back end uses the open trivia DB, but supports multiple categories per
game. I'm currently caching the questions in to a DB. When I have them all, I
will be able to improve the initial load times, which is currently 1-2 seconds
per category selected at the beginning of each game. It won't scale well until
then. I should be posting a Show HN in the near future.

Anybody know of any other trivia DB's out there? I found a dead github repo.
There is a fair bit but it is really rough. There should be some from IRC
trivia bots from back in the day, but I haven't found them. Commercial ones
are out, as there will be no ads, tracking or monetization of any kind. Just a
simple & light trivia mobile-friendly web app.

