2020 LISO Invitational (Long Island, NY) Div B & C

[jaggie34]

PPP (1st): Supervisors were nice but event wasn't run well either. I heard from others that the measured times were inaccurate, which is a really big problem when 40 teams have times of 2 to 5 seconds. There was also a problem with the launcher leaking air. Venue 2/10 but overall 7/10

Out of curiosity, what was your time for PPP?

[builderguy135]

PPP (1st): Supervisors were nice but event wasn't run well either. I heard from others that the measured times were inaccurate, which is a really big problem when 40 teams have times of 2 to 5 seconds. There was also a problem with the launcher leaking air. Venue 2/10 but overall 7/10

Out of curiosity, what was your time for PPP?

1st flight (conservative) was 12 seconds, 2nd flight was tiered and got 18 seconds (hit the ceiling)

[GoldenKnight1]

Code Busters: The test was unusual. A lot of teams got the bonus very quickly, obviously recognizing the quote. We took quite a bit longer but still got some bonus points. For the first time in (many) tests we got the Xenocrypt as well. Notably, some questions/ciphers that were usually assigned high point values (Morbit/Pollux, etc.) were assigned lower ones, something that might have affected our placement. I ended up skipping a morse cipher when I saw there were three "space" characters in a row (or something similar, I don't remember.) I haven't gotten a chance to look at the test yet, so we'll see what that actually was.

We did not recognize the quote. We assumed the second word was "the" because it appeared twice and the freq of letters and filled in the rest. It was solved in the same way we normally solve any aristo.
I do agree that the point value of morbit/pollux was low (IMO most tests I've seen set it very low, besides cornell, I haven't seen Morbit/Polluxes with high point values). I think for those lengths something closer to 250-300 points would be better.

Morse code: On Toebes it recommends 100-150 points for the Morse code type questions of around 40 characters. Under 5.b.i.1 this would be an "easy" question and I would have to agree. You were given 6 of the 9 or 10 digits options and neither of the Morse code questions required guessing but rather just plugging in what fits. Now if this kind of question allowed me to provide fewer than 6 digits or had errors I could see making this question worth more but that is not what we have in this year's rules.

Time Bonus:
As was said above "the" appeared twice. Unfortunately I doubt many knew the quote but if you knew who Frederick Douglas was the words "slavery" and "abolition" should come to mind. Either of which if placed would have given you a significant portion of the letters in the question. Looking at the time taken by teams to solve the bonus I don't think "a lot" of teams got the bonus "very quickly". I would have said only 1 to 3 teams tops could be called "very quickly".
1-2 Minutes: 1 Team
2-3 Minutes: 0 Teams
3-4 Minutes: 2 Teams
4-5 Minutes: 2 Teams
5-6 Minutes: 7 Teams
6-7 Minutes: 7 Teams
7-8 Minutes: 3 Teams
8-9 Minutes: 2 Teams
9-10 Minutes: 6 Teams

[waterlubber]

[snip]

Morse code: On Toebes it recommends 100-150 points for the Morse code type questions of around 40 characters. Under 5.b.i.1 this would be an "easy" question and I would have to agree. You were given 6 of the 9 or 10 digits options and neither of the Morse code questions required guessing but rather just plugging in what fits. Now if this kind of question allowed me to provide fewer than 6 digits or had errors I could see making this question worth more but that is not what we have in this year's rules.

Time Bonus:
As was said above "the" appeared twice. Unfortunately I doubt many knew the quote but if you knew who Frederick Douglas was the words "slavery" and "abolition" should come to mind. Either of which if placed would have given you a significant portion of the letters in the question. Looking at the time taken by teams to solve the bonus I don't think "a lot" of teams got the bonus "very quickly". I would have said only 1 to 3 teams tops could be called "very quickly".
1-2 Minutes: 1 Team
2-3 Minutes: 0 Teams
3-4 Minutes: 2 Teams
4-5 Minutes: 2 Teams
5-6 Minutes: 7 Teams
6-7 Minutes: 7 Teams
7-8 Minutes: 3 Teams
8-9 Minutes: 2 Teams
9-10 Minutes: 6 Teams

Makes sense. I probably miscounted in the heat of the moment.
If I remember correctly, we got it somewhere around the 5 minute mark, give or take 30 seconds.

[Name]

Morse code: On Toebes it recommends 100-150 points for the Morse code type questions of around 40 characters. Under 5.b.i.1 this would be an "easy" question and I would have to agree. You were given 6 of the 9 or 10 digits options and neither of the Morse code questions required guessing but rather just plugging in what fits. Now if this kind of question allowed me to provide fewer than 6 digits or had errors I could see making this question worth more but that is not what we have in this year's rules.

I'm not a huge fan of all of Toebes point recommendations (just Morbit/Pollux, RSA, and Vignere). For example Toebes states of RSA Decode Year questions "15 points per 1 bit and 5 points per 0 bit in the binary representation of d (shown by the tool) with a minimum of 120 points" Which would make RSA basically pointless to do because it takes so long for very little points.

In general yes Morbit/Pollux are "easy" to do, but I find them time consuming. The same thing kinda applies to RSA, they're time consuming and just plugging and chugging, and there's no "trick" to speed them up. You can treat a caeser or a affine as a aristo, there's tricks (although I find they're more prone to error, and I tend to stick with a calculator) for quickly doing hill encode or decode, and (although idk anyone who would even bother doing this) you can just memorize each bacon correspondence.

The more skill based ciphers (aristos/patristos/xenos) should obviously be rewarded, but IMO past that code is about speed. I think that the other type of questions should offer a similar points/solve time ratio so there's no type of question that's like don't bother doing that unless you finished everything else already.

Also compare the point value to a caeser shift. Morbit/Pollux takes more skill than caeser, and probably takes significantly longer to solve, yet the recommended value is almost the same.

[jaggie34]

PPP (1st): Supervisors were nice but event wasn't run well either. I heard from others that the measured times were inaccurate, which is a really big problem when 40 teams have times of 2 to 5 seconds. There was also a problem with the launcher leaking air. Venue 2/10 but overall 7/10

Out of curiosity, what was your time for PPP?

1st flight (conservative) was 12 seconds, 2nd flight was tiered and got 18 seconds (hit the ceiling)

That's pretty impressive, especially for a normal gym!

[builderguy135]

Out of curiosity, what was your time for PPP?

1st flight (conservative) was 12 seconds, 2nd flight was tiered and got 18 seconds (hit the ceiling)

That's pretty impressive, especially for a normal gym!

They said it was 18.5 feet but rafters were to 15 feet, I think.

[Giantpants]

So I’m pretty late, but I may as well after getting a chance to look at my tests

Astronomy (8th) - So akin to what Name said this test was very easy. Pretty much the only thing we lost major points on was on the Sun-Jupiter problem, which, since it was worth 11 points, was probably enough to knock us down to 8th. But tbh since otherwise the test was easy and I was happy to get a single digit with so many high level teams in the field, based off of what were probably really close scores, even though I had def hoped to do better. Next time ig. So I’ll give it a 8/10 bc of kinda low difficulty, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad test!

Dynamic Planet (10th) - Again, I was a tad disappointed by 10th, even if this was a pretty easy one too. Looking at it now I see we got a few more multiple choice wrong than I thought, so maybe 10th fit well. There was one written question, asking “Name some places on the ocean floor where you can find...” each of the types of plate boundaries. For transform I wrote the faults on a mid ocean ridge, for divergent a mid ocean ridge, and for convergent a trench and subduction zone, but I got a clean 0 points. I’m guessing they wanted specific places?? But that wasn’t indicated anywhere in the question... Idk. Did anyone else have this problem? Otherwise, like Astronomy, it showed that an easy test isn’t necessarily a bad test, and I thought it did a good job of covering a lot of material and different topics! I’ll give 7/10 again bc of my one scoring query and generally easy test.

Geologic Mapping (9th) - My regular partner had to cancel last minute, so I wasn’t too bummed out at this placement with a fill in partner. She did an epic job on the topograhpic profiles lol and although there was def some stuff we didn’t know, ig we did a fine job on the stuff we did! Regardless, I’ll give it a 8/10, even if it wasn’t the hardest test.

Sounds of Music (3rd) - Another great test by the Mount Academy squad. Covered a lot of stuff, showed us what we knew and what we didn’t (solfege, my partner and I were sounding out the Star Spangled Banner during the test and writing out pitches, that was very tough, as well as volume units at the very end lol) The proctors running it were very nice also!! Easy 10/10 from me.

Sounds of Music: The software they used couldnt really pick up some of our notes compared to the ones that we used when practicing which was a bummer.

Super sorry to hear this D: Our instrument’s lowest notes can be kinda quiet too but we ensured we wouldn’t have that issue by holding the mic directly up to it. This software was the same one they used at Cornell, so if you can’t register quietish fundamental pitches with it then it may be something to fix, in case it shows up again at another invitational (or even regionals or states!) Idk how one would do that but I’m sure you can figure it out.

Overall, LISO was a super ambitious competition (and it’s clear that they knew that based on the info doc), but other than the super late awards ceremony, I thought it was pretty successful. Maybe it’s just an indicator that there some sort of limit on the amount of teams that one can feasibly host. Regardless, I think it was pretty successful, and the results were pretty interesting. I’m super thankful to Brother Nigel, the Syosset team, and the whole Stony Brook SO group for pulling this off. I didn’t really know this competition was going for a regional test level, but looking back that explains the difficulty of some of my events, which puzzled me throughout the day. Congrats to WWPN, Ward Melville, Stuyvesant, Cumberland Valley, Rustin, WWPS, and Syosset for all doing really well!

[LiteralRhinoceros]

There was one written question, asking “Name some places on the ocean floor where you can find...” each of the types of plate boundaries. For transform I wrote the faults on a mid ocean ridge, for divergent a mid ocean ridge, and for convergent a trench and subduction zone, but I got a clean 0 points. I’m guessing they wanted specific places?? But that wasn’t indicated anywhere in the question... Idk. Did anyone else have this problem?

we got 2/3 i wrote mid ocean for divergent and trench for convergent, transform i did smth dumb, but that's really weird

[terence.tan]

So I’m pretty late, but I may as well after getting a chance to look at my tests

Astronomy (8th) - So akin to what Name said this test was very easy. Pretty much the only thing we lost major points on was on the Sun-Jupiter problem, which, since it was worth 11 points, was probably enough to knock us down to 8th. But tbh since otherwise the test was easy and I was happy to get a single digit with so many high level teams in the field, based off of what were probably really close scores, even though I had def hoped to do better. Next time ig. So I’ll give it a 8/10 bc of kinda low difficulty, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad test!

Dynamic Planet (10th) - Again, I was a tad disappointed by 10th, even if this was a pretty easy one too. Looking at it now I see we got a few more multiple choice wrong than I thought, so maybe 10th fit well. There was one written question, asking “Name some places on the ocean floor where you can find...” each of the types of plate boundaries. For transform I wrote the faults on a mid ocean ridge, for divergent a mid ocean ridge, and for convergent a trench and subduction zone, but I got a clean 0 points. I’m guessing they wanted specific places?? But that wasn’t indicated anywhere in the question... Idk. Did anyone else have this problem? Otherwise, like Astronomy, it showed that an easy test isn’t necessarily a bad test, and I thought it did a good job of covering a lot of material and different topics! I’ll give 7/10 again bc of my one scoring query and generally easy test.

Geologic Mapping (9th) - My regular partner had to cancel last minute, so I wasn’t too bummed out at this placement with a fill in partner. She did an epic job on the topograhpic profiles lol and although there was def some stuff we didn’t know, ig we did a fine job on the stuff we did! Regardless, I’ll give it a 8/10, even if it wasn’t the hardest test.

Sounds of Music (3rd) - Another great test by the Mount Academy squad. Covered a lot of stuff, showed us what we knew and what we didn’t (solfege, my partner and I were sounding out the Star Spangled Banner during the test and writing out pitches, that was very tough, as well as volume units at the very end lol) The proctors running it were very nice also!! Easy 10/10 from me.

Sounds of Music: The software they used couldnt really pick up some of our notes compared to the ones that we used when practicing which was a bummer.

Super sorry to hear this D: Our instrument’s lowest notes can be kinda quiet too but we ensured we wouldn’t have that issue by holding the mic directly up to it. This software was the same one they used at Cornell, so if you can’t register quietish fundamental pitches with it then it may be something to fix, in case it shows up again at another invitational (or even regionals or states!) Idk how one would do that but I’m sure you can figure it out.

Overall, LISO was a super ambitious competition (and it’s clear that they knew that based on the info doc), but other than the super late awards ceremony, I thought it was pretty successful. Maybe it’s just an indicator that there some sort of limit on the amount of teams that one can feasibly host. Regardless, I think it was pretty successful, and the results were pretty interesting. I’m super thankful to Brother Nigel, the Syosset team, and the whole Stony Brook SO group for pulling this off. I didn’t really know this competition was going for a regional test level, but looking back that explains the difficulty of some of my events, which puzzled me throughout the day. Congrats to WWPN, Ward Melville, Stuyvesant, Cumberland Valley, Rustin, WWPS, and Syosset for all doing really well!

Which software did they use for sounds of music?