Return of the Large Hardon Collider

January 14-15, 2011

Contest Notes

The members of Return of the Large Hardon Collider were students at Northwestern University. As such this became the second contest to be hosted off of the Williams campus, the first being Minnesota Pigpen's January 2010 offering. The contest flowed over the airwaves and the internet from WNUR in Evanston, Illinois.

All participants felt that the technical handling of the contest was excellent. The stream was consistent all night long (one consequence of using a much larger station than WCFM), and the DJs were efficient and entertaining. LHC's web provider could not run Perl scripts, so Stephanie wrote the web handling routines in another language in the week before the contest. The software worked basically without a hitch; the only complaint was that after registering teams were unable to edit their team information, such as trash talk, which has become a Trivia tradition since being introduced in Worker and Parasite's contest at the suggestion of Carol Mohr.

The announcement of the final scores at 7AM was very rushed, and only the short names of the top 5 teams were read, from the top down, dissapointing teams who had waited up to hear the reading. WNUR is a busy radio station and LHC was worried that they were going to be kicked out by the next scheduled program. We can honestly say that was never a problem on WCFM!

One of the conditions for using WNUR for the contest was there be frequent Public Service Announcements (PSAs) and warnings that some material might be inappropriate. They seemed to come about every 15 mintues. It was odd, but everyone got used to them.

Action Trivia continued its decline, as only one team (BreastFriends) submitted a bonus (the first one).

Two teams from Northwestern played in the contest, BreastFriends and The Downstairs Mix-Up. Time will tell if the contest has caught on in Illinois. All longtime players who commented on the mailing list felt that LHC did an excellent job upholding the Williams Trivia tradition.

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