BrainBashers: November's Results

Hi,

November's results for the BrainBashers monthly contests are now ready:

How Low Dare You Go? was won with 46:
www.brainbashers.com/howlow

And summary of Common Answers appears below:
www.brainbashers.com/common

With 1,296 valid entries, I managed to come 5th, well done to me!

Q1. Name a character from The Simpsons. 1 BART 628 2 HOMER 497 3 LISA 49 4 MARGE 39 5 MAGGIE 24

Q2. Name a sport which uses a racket. 1 TENNIS 1190 2 BADMINTON 44 3 RACKET BALL 35 4 SQUASH 8 5 CRICKET [DISALLOWED] 6 [Scores 1]

Q3. Name one of either TO, TOO, or TWO 1 TO 587 2 TWO 407 3 TOO 276

Q4. Name the number of leaves on a fully grown tree. 1 1,000 207 2 10,000 115 3 1,000,000 110 4 500 68 5 5,000 61

Q5. Name a phone company. 1 AT&T 387 2 VERIZON 135 3 BT 106 4 BELL 90 5 SBC 84

Q6. Name a square number below 99. 1 4 251 2 81 137 3 25 135 4 9 118 5 16 104

Q7. Name a year in the decade known as the '70s. 1 1975 285 2 1970 172 3 1976 145 4 1971 109 5 1977 105

Q8. Name a unit of time. 1 MINUTE 387 2 HOUR 377 3 SECOND 289 4 YEAR 27 5 DAY 16

Q9. Name a word which does <b>NOT</b> contain A, E, I, O, U. 1 WHY 200 2 BY 145 3 MY 116 4 FLY 96 5 SKY 83

Q10. Name the colour of a uniform worn by an official. 1 BLUE 860 2 BLACK 194 3 GREEN 96 4 WHITE 34 5 RED 25

Steve Gomori 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 Gustave J Caluori 2 1 1 1 1 4 1 1 1 1 Nathaniel Newell 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 Katie Timmins 1 1 1 1 1 4 2 1 1 1 Kevin Stone 1 1 1 3 1 3 1 2 1 1 Aanchal Gupta 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 3 2 1 Maya Borges 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 1 Kyle Pope 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 2 5 1 Erin Walker 2 1 1 1 1 1 5 1 2 1 Martin Vogt 1 1 1 2 1 1 5 2 1 1

Hrmph. By now you should be at least in the top three!

Allowing/disallowing. I think it's got out of hand, as shown by the fact that it's got to the stage that you're making judgement calls like allowing Wiggum but disallowing Apu. (And there are still people listed who apparently got the 13th-22nd answers for this question, even though you only allowed 12 answers.) Disallowing 1,200 leaves but allowing 50. Illinois Valley Cellular?? Phylum??? etc. etc. And if six people think cricket uses a racket, well, there's a lot of dumb people in the world and they should be allowed to enter contests too.

I can't even remember now why you started bothering weeding out the mis-answers.

Still a great contest and site though.

Shouldn't we all?! It's worse this month as I'm already in the bottom 50% for a really silly answer of my own (which I did think could win!).

With over 1,000 entries, scoring can get a little tedious with people trying to be 'clever' with their answers, so I disallow some of them in the vain hope that next month they try harder. I don't believe for a second that Sideshow Bob was ever going to win, and can't imagine that the person who entered did either.

I'm ultimately trying to get *everyone* to try, otherwise I can spend ages weeding out useless answers. When this eventually happens I might be able to have some questions which have more options for their answers.

I don't understand - for Q1, there were 22 valid answers.

PS Did you think HYMN would really win for Q9?

I was joking, of course; 5th out of a number approaching infinity is pretty impressive.

Okay.

oh. Do dashes in the table mean that no answer was given?

I forgot I entered! Oh yeah, there I am, 212th. I thought with that question people would put down the first example which came into their head, so that's what I did.