“Proving the namesake property in one of these data structures relies on the Dynamic Finger Conjecture, and data structures without their characteristic property can obtain it by running an algorithm named for Day, Stout and Warren. In one of these data structures, their characteristic property is maintained through operations like a zig-zag during searches.”

 

Around this point in the moderator’s statement, a buzzer sounded. The University of Minnesota Quiz Bowl team, playing in the final round of Academic Competition Federation (ACF) Quiz Bowl Nationals against Stanford’s team, gave an answer: “tree.” When prompted for more, the team incorrectly answered “B-tree” instead of the correct “self-balanced binary search tree”–a mistake that wasn’t noted by the moderator at the time, but would later cost the Minnesota team their finals title and give Stanford’s team its first ever national championship in ACF format.

For the four-person team, a championship title in last weekend’s national tournament is the cap on several years of hard work. The tournament, hosted by the University of Maryland on April 17 and 18, was the fourth in a row for team member Arnav Moudgil ’10, a photo editor for The Daily.

“It feels great to finally win,” Moudgil said, who further noted that the team “got absolutely destroyed” during his first year at nationals in 2007. In 2008, the team placed sixth; in 2009, third.

After an early Stanford lead, the University of Minnesota team began to catch up and eventually passed the Cardinal’s score. At the end of the game, Minnesota stood ahead, but Stanford protested an earlier answer–the question regarding self-balanced binary search trees–and the question was ruled in Stanford’s favor, giving it its national title.

“It’s not the nicest way of winning,” said Kristiaan de Greve, another member of the team and a fifth-year doctoral student in electrical engineering. “The other team knew their answer was incorrect, but they were hoping it would be allowed.”

The team acknowledged that their most skilled player is Andrew Yaphe, a third-year law student who is widely recognized as the best player in the history of collegiate quiz bowl, having been the leading scorer on eight championship national teams.

“He literally got 70 or 80 percent of our winning points at nationals,” said Brian Lindquist, the fourth team member and fifth-year doctoral student in physics. “But he also wouldn’t have won without us.”

The tournament was demanding, with an extensive round-robin day on Saturday and a bracketed setup for the finals on Sunday. The team, however, is used to competition. All of the members have played at least five years, most having started in high school. With three graduate students and one undergraduate senior, the team was a bit of an exception to most teams which have fewer graduate students. University of Minnesota, the team’s final opponent, was all undergraduates.

“We might have been the oldest team there,” Moudgil said.

The team tossed around quiz bowl lingo in describing their preparation for the competition.

“I’d say about half of the questions I got right was ‘fraudulent’ knowledge,” Lindquist said, referring to knowledge acquired specifically for quiz bowl, as opposed to information the players already knew from their general knowledge.

De Greve also distinguished between ACF format and the other main format, National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT), which is not timed and contains more popular culture subjects in questions, whereas ACF is “purely academic,” De Greve said.

“ACF has no ‘trash’ questions at all,” he said, referring to non-academic questions found in NAQT competition.

Although the team’s win was an appreciated victory, the members emphasized that they play mostly for the joy of the game and the intellectual challenge.

“It exposes you to a lot of new things that you might not otherwise learn about,” Moudgil said. “I’m a biology major, I’m not gonna otherwise get that much exposure to, say, philosophy.”

“I like competing,” Lindquist said. “This is something that I can actually do well at, unlike sports.”